


Ladybird

by RHJunior



Category: Friendship is Magic - Fandom, My Little Pony, Worm - Fandom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2019-05-06 21:37:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 49,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14656733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RHJunior/pseuds/RHJunior
Summary: Taylor Hebert is about to Trigger-- when two somebodies, or two SomePONIES, intercede...





	1. Chapter 1

Taylor gazed in horror at the filth spilling out at her feet. Before she could do more than gag, hands seized her from behind and shoved her forward into the locker. Refuse and roaches welled up around her legs as the locker door slammed shut behind her. She gagged, retched, and screamed, kicking and thrashing, trying to kick the door back open-- she heard the lock snap shut. “Enjoy your stay with the rest of the filth, Hebert,” a voice taunted her from outside. Emma? It was Emma?? No, Emma wouldn’t do this, things were bad but Emma would never go this far.. “Emma, please, don’t do this-- please you were my FRIEND--”

Three voices rang out with mocking laughter at her pleas. “Can you believe this bitch?” she heard Sophia say. “You were my friend, you were my friend--”

“I was never your friend, you hopeless sop.” Emma’s voice cut through the steel door into Taylor’s ears like a knife. “Nobody’s worthless enough to be a friend with something as worthless as you! Sit in there and rot with the rest of the garbage!”

A year and a half of torment finally came to a head; that last strut holding together the edifice of Taylor Hebert finally broke.

Everything went dark. Then the void filled with teeming, swirling light. Something vast, enormous, a fractal impossibility swarmed in the dark. Something vast as a continent broke free and floated down. It reached out a tendril glowing with countless promises, reached down--

“ _What is this?”_

The Shard hesitated. INTERSECTION/INTERFERENCE/INTERVENTION?

“ _Oh, Sister, this is terrible.”_ Something white, golden, an aurora of pastels.

Something else; dark indigo, swirling with pinpoints of glittering light. _“Strewth, what-- infestation is this?”_

“ _We should have stopped by decades ago...”_

“ _We must needs make amends--”_

“ _It will take some doing. We must be careful.”_

“ _Yes. Carefully, subtly. But as for THIS wretchedness...”_

The Shard flinched back, too late. Dawn and Midnight swirled and struck; the Shard gave a shrill voiceless cry, then melted away to nothingness like a snowflake, a fractal returned to chaos.

Taylor reached out to the vanished tendril that had promised so much, despairing. _Hurt. Pain. Betrayal. Loss. Grief. Loneliness._

“ _Oh, poor little one.”_ The voice was as tender as the morning. _“Here, dear child. We cannot yet do much directly, but let us do this much for you...”_

_A horn of spiraled midnight, a horn of shining white, touched her brow. Everything suddenly changed and Taylor’s world exploded with light._

 

* * *

 

Sophia, Madison and Emma cackled outside Taylor’s locker. “Come on, let’s go before someone on staff shows up,” Madison said.

Sophia snorted. “Don’t worry about the STAFF, Mad,” she said disdainfully. “They haven’t got a testicle or a spine between ‘em. But yeah, let’s go and leave Hebert here to think about her place in life… wait, what..?” Sophia’s arrogant sneer had turned to a scowl of surprise and confusion. Puzzled, her two tag-alongs turned to see what she was staring at. Taylor’s cries had stopped, and now her locker was vibrating with a deep, ominous thrum. Pale lavender light was shining out of the ventilation slots and leaking out around the seams of the door.

The explosion naturally caught them completely by surprise.

 

* * *

 

The call went out over the PRT comlinks. _“Attention all Protectorate, this is Dispatch. We have a Trigger Event, I repeat, we have a Trigger Event at the Winslow High School, any Protectorate in the area please respond...”_

Armsmaster and Miss Militia were already on patrol, cruising the streets on their custom motorcycles. Armsmaster was the first to respond; he opened the comlink in his helmet and spoke up over the thrum of his engine. “Dispatch this is Armsmaster and Miss Militia, we are en route, what’s the sitrep?”

“We copy Armsmaster. According to reports we are receiving from inside the school, we have a code two, possibly a code three Trigger event inside Winslow. One of the students manifested just about fifteen minutes ago and has been rampaging through the school, pursuing one particular group of three female students through the hallways and classrooms, believed to be the ones responsible for the trigger event. The staff are evacuating, and according to phonecalls we are receiving from inside the school Shadow Stalker is already on the scene and responding.”

“Is that confirmed?”

“The caller is a Madison Clements, who apparently was given Shadow Stalker’s PRT phone by Shadow Stalker and told to report in.”

“Sir,” a voice broke in over the transmission. “This is Kid Win. I was doing a flyby on my way to the PRT building when the balloon went up. I’m in a holding pattern over the school, do you want me to engage?”

“No, Kid, do not engage till we arrive,” Miss Militia replied as they accelerated down the street. “Give us oversight till then. Do you see Shadow Stalker or the Trigger?”

“Yes, I have a visual on them both. The fight has moved to the cafeteria, I can see them through the cafeteria windows.” His voice sounded odd.

“Can you give us a description of the Trigger?” Armsmaster barked.

Now Kid Win’s voice sounded really strange. “Yyyes, sir, I can...” there was a pause. “It’s a lavender unicorn.”

“It’s a whaauuh?” Armsmaster was so startled he veered off the pavement at the next intersection, jolting over the sidewalk at the corner.

“It’s a little lavender unicorn with a curly black mane and tail,” Kid Win said with determined fatalism. _“And it is kicking Shadow Stalker’s ass.”_

 

* * *

 

 

By the time Miss Militia and Armsmaster roared into the Winslow parking lot, the school had been evacuated. The student body, for a surprise, was still there, milling about at a distance and craning their necks to see; their morbid curiosity apparently keeping them in attendance. The two heroes kicked open the double doors and moved in, commando style; the ruckus, or the remainder of it, was coming from down the hallway, through the cafeteria doors.

Another commando-style kick-and-enter and they were inside. What greeted their eyes had them both forgetting every shred of their training, lowering their weapons and standing there gormlessly slackjawed.

The hallways had shown signs of battle-- bent and half-ripped-off locker doors, books and litter blown about the floor, cracked and shattered lighting--- but this was a whole nother order of magnitude. Cafeteria tables had been sent tumbling, steel trash cans upended, plastic trays had been scattered everywhere, some shot through the shattered windows, others embedded in the drywall ceiling, their loads of food spattered hither and yon, half the lighting in the ceiling ripped loose, along with parts of the ceiling. It looked as if a troop of gorillas had decided to express their displeasure at the menu.

Off to one side was what had to be Shadow Stalker. At least Armsmaster surmised it was her, from what he could see of her. She was clad at least partially in her costume, presumably having to don the cloak and some bits of armor over her civilian clothes in haste. She was jammed headfirst into a partially full trash can. The mouth of the can had been crimped down by some force around her waist, pinning her arms by her sides and leaving her butt and flailing legs sticking in the air. Her crossbow pistols were lying on the floor, crushed like beer cans and tossed aside. Broken bolts-- the kind with steel heads, which she was NOT supposed to have, Armsmaster noted with displeasure-- were scattered across the floor, snapped like pencils.

At first he was puzzled as to why she was unable to free herself with her intangibility powers; then he noticed the blinking lights. Some well-meaning soul had apparently made an effort at decorating the cafeteria for the just-past holiday season and had strung electric lights around the ceiling; Shadow Stalker’s assailant had pulled down one strand and used it to tie up the abrasive Ward before stuffing her in the trash. Along with the troublesome Ward's many personal flaws, she also had a particular vulnerability: she could not go intangible and pass through anything with an electric current running through it, at least not without getting the mother of all un-insulated electric shocks. Muffled, sulfurous swearing was coming from inside the can as it rocked back and forth. Oh well, at least she was alive and, to judge by the vociferous nature of the swearing, in good shape.

On the back wall, between the hot plate lines where the chalkboard with the menu of the day hung, was a redheaded girl of about fifteen years of age. She was bruised, battered, spattered with dust and debris and looked absolutely terrified. She was pinned to the wall, held several feet up off the floor by a lavender aura that wrapped around her and pinned her arms to her sides.

At the other end of that aura was a tiny lavender unicorn. The glowing tip of its horn was barely higher than his own armored knee. It had childlike proportions, enormous blue eyes, and a mane and tail of tumbling ebon locks that would be the envy of any female. There was some sort of marking on each of its hips, but he couldn’t quite make it out as the tiny creature was spattered with absolutely vile looking filth, all over its hooved legs clear up to its shoulders and haunches. It stood there on all fours, splay legged, its eyes fixed on the girl in its intangible grip and an expression of unspeakable rage and pain on its childlike face.

The hostage saw the heroes standing there. “Oh god, help me! Kill it, shoot it, the freak’s going to KILL me--!”

“ _FREAK?”_ the little unicorn screamed. The voice was clearly feminine. “You and Madison and that _bitch_ Sophia--” Armsmaster’s face settled into an even grimmer scowl behind his visor at the name. He was getting together a picture of what happened that was uglier by the second.”-- torment me for a year and a half, you beat me up, destroy my things, steal my schoolwork, turn the entire _school_ against me, _stuff me in a locker full of rotting tampons--”_ and it became instantly clear what the mung and scraps of cotton and cloth clinging to her; Armsmaster and Miss Militia both suppressed gags-- “ _ **You turned my LIFE INTO HELL for LAUGHS, AND I’M THE FREAK??”**_

The girl went white. _“Taylor-- please--”_

She floated the girl about a foot away from the wall and slammed her back into it, hard enough to knock the wind out of her. “You were my FRIEND, Emma!” She pulled her out and slammed her into the wall again. “We grew UP together!” Slam. “We did EVERYTHING together!” Slam. “ _YOU WERE FAMILY!”_ Slam. “ ** _YOU were my SISTER! I LOVED YOU!_** ” Slam.

“I loved you...” the unicorn’s voice trailed off into a quavering whimper. The telekinetic aura faded away, “Emma” slid down the wall, battered and bruised but otherwise unharmed. The little unicorn’s face screwed itself up into a vision of agony and grief. Enormous tears welled up from the clenched shut eyes; with a gut wrenching sob she turned and ran blindly, staggering, out through the cafeteria doors.

That snapped Armsmaster and Miss Militia out of their fugue. “We’d better follow her,” Armsmaster said unnecessarily. “Kid Win!”

The teenage tinker was there, hovering just outside the shattered windows on his hoverboard. “Uh, yessir!”

“Stay here, administer first aid if it’s needed.” the trash can by the wall cursed some more. “And maybe see about getting Shadow Stalker out of there…. No rush though.” His bearded chin radiated a grim future for the probationary Ward. “I’m going to want her to stick around, if you get my meaning.”

“Got it sir.” Kid win snapped off a salute. Armsmaster nodded, and he and Miss Militia left in pursuit of the weeping unicorn. Kid floated in through the window and dismounted. After a cursory examination of the former hostage-- she was bruised and had a few scrapes, but otherwise unharmed-- he gave her a warning not to leave the premises until after the authorities had spoken to her. That done, he walked over to where his “teammate” was still imprisoned, and slapped an EMP cuff around her ankle. This elicited a shout of rage from the trash can. The cuffs in question were solid titanium alloy, rated for several categories of brute, were laced with high-voltage circuitry to restrain capes with intangibility powers, and had a built in tranquilizer to subdue anything else. They’d become standard issue shortly after Shadow Stalker had made her debut as a rogue, for some _peculiar_ reason. “SO.” Kid Win said loudly, slapping the side of the trash can. It made a deafening bang, eliciting yet another oath from the Ward inside. “Looks like you got your grimdark ass kicked by a Lisa Frank poster.” He played a quick bongo solo on the bottom of the can.

He held up his cellphone and hit record. The video of her epic swearing echoing out of that trashcan was going to be Youtube gold, he knew it.

* * *

 

It was fairly easy to track the fleeing unicorn; she was still leaving a trail behind her, bits of paper product and footprints-- hoofprints-- etched out in something tacky and disgusting neither of the Protectorate heroes wanted to think about. She wasn’t exactly evading them, either; the trail led straight to the school gym and beelined for the girl’s locker rooms. They stood outside the door, weapons at the ready.

“I’ll go in first,” Armsmaster said. He swung around the doorframe and in through the marked door.

Miss Militia said nothing. She holstered her weapon and stood in front of the door, arms crossed over her chest. “Three… Two… One...”

Armsmaster promptly came back out as quickly as he’d gone in. He pointed a thumb at the “women’s” logo on the door. “... _You_ go in. I’ll go…

“... Backtrack, examine the, ah, scene of the crime. Or something.” Miss Militia said. “Right.”

“...Right.” The tinker hero of Brockton Bay beat a hasty retreat. Miss Militia rolled her eyes, smirking behind her bandana, and walked inside.

It didn’t take much guessing to figure out where the distraught, mutated girl had run. Miss Militia could hear the showers going full blast, and the sound of the girl’s sobbing. She sighed, put her phone and wallet on a nearby bench for safekeeping and walked into the shower room.

Like everything else in Winslow, the shower room was bare, utilitarian and ugly. It was a single large room with bare concrete floors and walls, lined with drains and shower fixtures every few feet. Every shower head was going full blast, filling the room with spray and steam. The unicorn-girl was sitting on the floor under the last showerhead, hunched and miserable, water gushing over her and flattening her mane and tail. A few travel-size bottles of shampoo were scattered around her hooves. She was making a feeble attempt to scrub her own flanks with a hoof, trying to get the muck from the locker off her, and sobbing fit to break a heart of stone. She was the picture of abject misery. “Taylor?” Miss Militia said.

The unicorn looked up at her. If the sobbing hadn’t already done it, that face would have melted her heart like butter in a blast furnace. “Muh...Miss Militia…?” she quavered. “Oh… oh no...” she broke into a new round of tears.

Miss Militia took a long, invigorating breath and let it out in a sigh. She firmed herself to ignore the drenching her costume was about to get; she’d waded chest-deep through leech infested swamps, she could tolerate having soggy britches from a high school shower stall-- and walked inside. She crouched down next to the unicorn girl… next to Taylor… and carefully, gently rested a hand on her withers. “Hey,” she said gently. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

Taylor closed her eyes and shook her head, wet mane flapping around her neck. “I-- I Triggered,” she whimpered. “I went ‘Carrie’ on the whole school...”

“It’s not that bad, Taylor.”

“I’m gonna go to the Birdcage...” she sniffled.

Miss Militia couldn’t help but laugh a little. “No, I promise you are not going to the Birdcage,” she said. “Believe me I've seen far worse. Noone was seriously hurt… and the damage isn’t even too bad...” she picked up one of the bottles at their feet and opened it. “Tell you what, before anything else, let’s get this mess cleaned off. Then it’ll be that much easier to tackle whatever’s next. Here, let me give you a hand… you’re not going to get very far with hooves...” that said she emptied the bottle on Taylor’s head and back and began scrubbing in a no-nonsense fashion. The gunge sloughed off mercifully quick, swirling to the floor and down the drain.

Taylor held up one of her hooves and looked at it. “Why...?” she said.

“You Triggered,” Miss Militia said, going for the obvious answer. “Your transformation is… pretty extreme, but with help you will be able to adjust--”

“Why did they do that?” Taylor went on. “Why did they do _any_ of it?” She looked up at Miss Militia. “Months and months and months of hurting me, mocking me, hating me-- why would they do that. Why would a _hero_ do that to an unpowered person? Why would _anyone_ do that to anyone else? Why would someone do-- that-- to-- their-- best-- friend--” she broke down again, leaning her head against Miss Militia’s shoulder. “Why, why, why, why??”

Miss Militia patted her back and tried to think of something comforting. Then she realized the girl’s horn was glowing again. Trapped in indecision, unwilling to stay or leap away, she froze as the glow grew brighter-- then without warning the glow exploded in an enormous wave of lavender light--

 

* * *

 

 

Armsmaster looked at what was left of the row of lockers. It was obvious which one had been Taylor Hebert’s. If the filth and gunge spilling out of the bottom hadn’t been an obvious clue, there was the fact that it was no longer so much a rectangular steel and aluminum box as it was a work of modern art. It had been ruptured open from within like someone had stuffed an M-80 into a beer can and lit the fuse. It was a miracle noone had been injured…

Though perhaps not, he reflected on a second look. From the look the… detonation, for lack of a better word… had been deliberate, blasting almost entirely upwards and sideways, mashing several lockers on either side and peeling itself open and laying it out like the petals of a flower. An extremely jagged, incredibly VIOLENT flower, but still.

He poked through the rubbish spilling out of it with a handy pencil. (There were quite a few handy… there was quite a bit of stationary lying about where students had hastily abandoned their books in their quest to haul arse.) He wrinkled his nose at the mess: it looked to be at least several waste cans worth, and had been in there for a considerable amount of time, long enough for some of it to start to rot. Probably over the entire holiday break. Roaches scuttled over everything, eliciting a grunt of disgust from him.

And they’d taken another human being and stuffed them into a locker full of this, he thought. Just for their own amusement. What kind of a teenage sociopath did this sort of thing?

His memory flashed back to a certain crossbow-wielding, highly antagonistic teenage vigilante of his own acquaintance and winced. Exactly, _that_ sort of teenage sociopath…

“Hello?” one of the lockers said.

Armsmaster stared, then walked down the hall to where the locker in question stood. “Who is this?”

“I’m Madison?” the locker said, tremulous.

“The girl who called in the alert,” Armsmaster said, remembering.

“Uh huh.” There was a pause. “Is the scary pony gone yet?” she said, her voice high and fearful.

“She has been dealt with. How did you get possession of Shadow Stalker’s phone?” Armsmaster asked, his ‘interrogation’ voice on full.

“We stuffed the Taylor bitch in the locker, and then there was this explosion-- this EXPLOSION and purple light _everywhere_ and _screaming_ and the angry pony was _coming after us-_ -” the voice halted, then started again. “And then Sophia was pulling on a mask and armor and getting this crossbow out of the janitor’s closet, and she shoves this phone in my hands and yells at me to call the PRT and what to tell them… so I hid in here and called...”

“That phone is PRT property, I need it back,” Armsmaster said. The locker door cracked open just wide enough for the phone to slide out. He took it; the door shut again. “….Aren’t you coming out of there?”

“I think I’ll stay in here a while,” the locker whimpered.

“….Very well.” He returned to the ruined locker at the other end of the hall and poked about in the rubbish with the toe of his boot. Well, there wasn’t much here that any forensics officer couldn’t figure out. He grimaced…

Then the walls began to vibrate. The lockers rattled against each other. Armsmaster braced himself, but before he could do more than that a wave of lavender light swept down the hallway, passed through him, and then passed on down the hall-- eliciting a scream from Madison the Locker Girl-- before disappearing.

Armsmaster staggered and blinked. Then blinked again. The hallway was suddenly full of butterflies, blues and yellows and greens, a riot of color flitting back and forth. Where had they all come from?

He looked down. The mess of filthy bandages and tampons and dried blood had vanished, replaced with-- “red and white rose petals?” he muttered. An enormous yellow and blue butterfly alighted on his helmet, unnoticed. He rewound his helmet cam and re-watched the last ten seconds of footage.

He blinked. He blinked again. Had he seen…?

Yes, there it was. As the wave of purplish light had washed over the cockroaches, they had transformed, one by one, into brilliantly colored butterflies.

 

* * *

 

 

It was a scene. The entire student body was still milling about, E88 punks heedlessly rubbing shoulders with ABB, Merchant junkies with E88, preps with jocks, all crowding in among the vehicles surrounding the building. Police squad cars, the fire department, the EMT, a PRT van and at least one TV News van were there; the PRT and BBPD were working to keep the crowd back while the school principal was busy shmoozing with the news crew, preening for the camera and spin doctoring as hard as she could.

As the mobbing students watched, the school doors opened and Armsmaster came striding out, his boots clanking loudly on the cracked sidewalk and his lips set in a thin line. Immediately behind him came Miss Militia, inexplicably soaked, and carrying a large bundle of towels from which peeped a mass of tousled curly black hair and pair of wide, worried eyes. The weaponsmaster cape made a beeline for the PRT vehicle; the crowd of students parting like the Red Sea before Moses the instant they caught a good look at what was in her arms.

Miss Militia smirked to herself as she climbed aboard. She was going to derive a lot of enjoyment in the future recalling hard-faced asian gangsters and tattooed neonazi punks retreating in wide-eyed fear from a little lavender unicorn.

Armsmaster cast about, looking for the principal: a highly unpleasant, scrawny blonde woman with a bowl-cut hairdo. She had struck him, even in his brief encounters, as completely unqualified to maintain discipline or structure over an educational institution such as this one, much less over a Ward like Shadow Stalker. Well, if what he had pieced together over this fiasco was any indicator, his original assessment had been laughably generous. He spotted her over by the news van, giving an obviously prolonged interview to the press, as the saying went, before the bodies had even cooled-- another damning black mark against her. He strode over, the butt of his halberd striking the pavement with every step so hard it should have struck sparks.

“Yes, the Protectorate responded immediately,” Principal Blackwell was saying. “The girl has been a problem for the school in the past, but we of course never suspected--”

A steel-gauntleted hand clapped down over the microphone. “Any and all information on this matter is under PRT jurisdiction,” he said. “Further inquiries will be addressed in a prepared press release.” The cameraman and the hair-sprayed talking head both yelped in complaint. He ignored them and pulled Principal Blackwell away by her skinny arm.

“What is the meaning of this--” she yipped.

“I would like to know, Principal Blackwell, why you have not complied with PRT or Protectorate procedures like you agreed to.” Armsmaster’s voice was low and dangerous.

“Now what do you--”

“You were supposed to keep a tight rein on Sophia Hess while she was under your supervision,” he said, his voice clipped. “You were supposed to immediately report any disciplinary problems-- any of them!-- to Director Piggot or myself. Yet I have just uncovered evidence of what had to be the culmination of a year long campaign of sadistic bullying by her and her two underlings against another of your students; one severe and traumatic enough to induce a _TRIGGER EVENT.”_ His temper was growing so hot that the biofeedback readings were making the servo motors in his suit whine.

“And to cap it all off I find you out here, talking with the press, disclosing information about a metahuman incident involving those same students _without our clearance._ Principal Blackwell, you are in a great deal of legal trouble of so many kinds and variations it will take a week just to write out the list.”

Blackwell’s mouth flopped open and closed like that of a particularly unattractive fish. “Our legal department will be in touch both with you and with the Hebert family. We will be requesting many things, Principal Blackwell. Including all school records and files concerning all the parties involved, one GLOWING recommendation for transfer to Arcadia for one Miss Taylor Hebert, and your signature on a Non-Disclosure Agreement that will require you to fill out forms in triplicate before you pass so much as a FART, much less any information about what occurred today.

And for your own best interests, Principal Blackwell, I recommend you develop a sudden, fantastic case of amnesia concerning Taylor Hebert or anything to do with her. The only words that should cross your lips about her from here on out should be ‘Taylor Who?’

“ _Am I PERFECTLY CLEAR?”_

Blackwell fishmouthed for a few more seconds. “...Yes?” she squeaked.

“Very good.” He started to stalk away, when yet another microphone and camera lens appeared in his path. Another blow-dried talking monkey, this one possibly male, beamed in his face. “Armsmaster, we just wanted to congratulate you and your fellow Protectorate members for swiftly bringing an end to this terroristic attack against one of our schools,” he said, his teeth gleaming. “Can you tell us anything about the events that led to this terrible rampage against innocent children?”

Armsmaster looked over his head at the teeming crowd of students. He spotted Merchants, Neonazis, Azian Bad Boys, and other gang colors scattered among them…. But that wasn’t so much to the point as the expressions he saw on all their faces. Whether they were jocks, preps, punks or gangers, it was the same; apathetic boredom, morbid anticipation, ghoulish eagerness-- all of them waiting for a little blood or mayhem, all of them waiting to catch a little bit of the spectacle of someone else’s life coming apart at the seams.

He felt a vein twitch in his eyelid. Wordlessly, he activated the Crowd Addressing System in his armor, amplifying is voice enough to be heard by the entire mob. **“Yes. I have found evidence that this incident was caused by a months-long campaign of sadistic and cowardly bullying against a student, one of such breathtaking cruelty and viciousness that it caused the innocent victim to go into a power-triggering emotional breakdown. Furthermore it was committed by three of the most popular students in this student body for no better reason than their own petty amusement.”** Out of the corner of his eye he saw a seriously bedraggled and garbage-spattered Shadow Stalker being hustled into another PRT vehicle and felt a moment of satisfaction.  
**“It is also clear from what we have already learned that this campaign of bullying was made astronomically worse by the cooperation, both passive and active, covert and overt, implicit and explicit, of the COWARDLY and GUTLESS student body and school staff, who witnessed this CRIMINAL AND INHUMAN ABUSE and did NOTHING AT ALL to intervene.** **Many of them even contributed or participated.** **..and noone, absolutely noone, tried to help the victim.”** several of the teachers and students gaped in outrage, more than one cringed in guilt. **“** **So I would have to say that it is my professional opinion that this entire school is full of nothing but WORTHLESS LITTLE SHITS.”**

 **“Thank you and good day.”** He roughly shouldered the flabbergasted reporter aside.

It was probably only his imagination that he heard several students on the fringes of the crowd applauding as he climbed inside the PRT transport.

He sat down across from Miss Militia, who was still cradling a towel swaddled Taylor in her lap. The patriot-themed hero’s eyebrows had nearly climbed past her hairline. “May I ask where that all came from?” she asked in a mild tone.

Armsmaster stared off at nothing in particular. “You are aware of some of the things they speculate about me on ParaHumans Online?” he said. “Autistic? Asperger’s Syndrome? That sort of thing?”

“Er, yes?”

His face, what one could see of it, was impassive. “How well do you think the public school system, or the children in it, treated autistic-spectrum children twenty to thirty years ago?”

The back of the transport was silent for a moment. “So what now?” Taylor said.

“We contact your parents or guardian...” Miss Militia said.

“Father,” Taylor said. “My mother, she-- it’s just me and my Father,” she corrected herself.

“We contact your Father, and have him come out to the PRT building where we discuss your membership in the Wards.”

Taylor’s ears pricked up (Miss Militia barely restrained herself from squeeing at the adorable. It would have been terrible for her image.) “Really? You want me in the Wards? Even after all this?”

Miss Militia’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “Like I said, we’ve seen a lot worse than this.” Taylor’s muzzle wrinkled as she considered the track record of a certain other Ward in the next vehicle; Miss Militia wasn’t kidding.

“It’s sort of inevitable isn’t it,” Taylor said.

“It is most likely the best place for you,” Armsmaster said matter-of-factly. “With your unique circumstances and abilities, you are going to have some equally unique necessities. The PRT and the Protectorate are the best equipped to provide those.”

Taylor nodded glumly. “Something tells me a secret identity’s not exactly in the offing, is it?”

Miss Militia smothered a snicker. “Probably not. I think you’ll still need a cape name though. Taylor’s a nice name, but I don’t think ‘Taylor the Unicorn’ has quite the right pizzazz.”

Taylor made a noncommital noise, but it was clear she agreed.

Armsmaster glanced down. “Hmm.. interesting.”

Taylor saw where he was looking. “Do you mind not staring at my butt, sir?” she said.

“What? Oh, hm, sorry,” he said, hastily averting his eyes and sitting stiffly. “I was just noting your odd markings… did you have tattoos before your transformation?”

“What? No!” Taylor protested. She craned her neck to peer at her own uncovered haunch. “What, what is that?”

Miss Militia poked at the mark. “It’s a ladybird,” she said with a smile in her voice.

“Hey!” Taylor protested. “… No, that's not what I meant, I meant how..." she gave up on that line of discussion. "Anyway that’s a ladybug...”

“You would be amazed at some of the strange symbols and markings that capes spontaneously produce," Miss Militia said. "I've seen capes that had complex mandalas appear on their skin, or paragraphs out of books they had read. And that’s what some people call ladybugs,” she added. “Ladybird.”

Taylor seemed to consider. “Ladybird, huh?… A good a name as any.” She rolled the name around in her mouth for the feel. “Yeah.”

“Ladybird.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

“Please, I just want to see my daughter,” Danny Hebert said, alternating between pleading and threatening. “Let me see my daughter!!”

“We will shortly sir,” Battery said patiently. “But there are some things you have to understand about your daughter’s condition--”

“Condition? I wasn’t told anything about a condition!” They were on the hospital floor of the Rig. Danny looked about frantically and saw a glassed-in room off to the side that seemed suspiciously active. “Is that where you’re keeping her?” he pointed. “Get out of my way!” He lunged past the protesting heroine and marched for the room.

Danny opened the door.

Inside a small mob of medical professionals and technicians were gathered around an examination table. Sitting on the examination table was an adorable little lavender unicorn with a curly black mane and tail and a ladybug tattoo on its hip. They all looked up to see who had come in and stared.

“Hi Daddy,” the little unicorn said.

Danny closed the door.

Several long, unnervingly quiet moments passed. Battery walked over and stood next to him.

“Okay….” Danny Hebert said, his voice calm as oceans. “I’m listening.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Here comes Shadow Stalker. She’s hopping along, still pulling on parts of her costume, guess she’s in a hurry-- she’s firing back down the hallway as she rounds the corner-- are those broadheads?? Naughty, Naughty, Shadow Stalker, you know you’re not allowed those… and heeeeere comes the unicorn! Woops, looks like little hoofies aren’t good for traction on tile, she just slid past the intersection but she’s a game one and she’s coming round the corner--- whoa, look at those eyes, she is out for BLOOD--”

Aegis groaned and palmed his temples. Of all things, giving Clock Blocker console duty as punishment for his past infractions was going to go down as the worst mistake of Aegis’ short career as leader of the Wards. He had possibly resorted to it one too many times in a failed attempt to simmer down the overly exuberant Ward, and Clockblocker had sworn that someday Aegis would regret it.

Well, he was right.

“And we switch now to footage from the cafeteria… Holy crap are those _exploding_ crossbow bolts? Why yes they are--- it’s double secret probation for you, Stalky-- too bad it seems our friend the unicorn has some sort of forcefield. Holy cow look at those tables fly--”

In retrospect, Aegis couldn’t think of a worse mistake than giving a boy whose down-time hobby was editing together comedy videos for Youtube access the PRT Console system. During the Trigger Event Incident earlier today, he had managed to tap into the Winslow security camera system, probably with help from Kid Win, set up a laptop to record the footage, and had in a matter of a couple hours spliced together a highlight reel of Shadow Stalker’s disastrous battle with the new Cape. He was now replaying it with great pleasure on his laptop to anyone who would watch. The footage was silent and in black and white (Winslow High was, in addition to being a terrible school, miserably cheap), and Clockblocker was narrating the onscreen action with relish.

Aegis suspected him of planning to add movie sound effects later. Possibly Yakkity Sax.

“Oh, oh, oh, she’s shooting out that glowing aura and it’s got Shadow Stalker by the leg! Ohhhh, slammed into the wall! And now the other wall! And the ceiling! And the floor! Ceiling! Floor! Wall again! And the floor! She’s gonna feel that in the morning all next week, folks--”

Thankfully, Aegis knew, the Triggered student hadn’t used nearly the force that it sounded like. Still, Shadow Stalker had bruises on top of her bruises, for sure...

“And she spots the trashcan by the wall… she shoots, she SCORES! Dun, duh duh dunt, DUN, duh duh dunt-- And that’s game, folks! Score: cute little unicorn, TWO, Shadow Stalker, NOTHIIING!”

The current captive audience was Kid Win and Browbeat. Clockblocker was sitting in the common room sofa with the laptop in his lap while the other two watched the video over his shoulder. Browbeat was leaning on the back of the sofa trying not to laugh; Kid Win was completely collapsed over it, by all appearances dying from lack of oxygen due to laughing so hard. “You do realize that if that video gets out on the internet I’ll have to kill you myself,” Aegis said to Clockblocker. “Otherwise Piggot will kill ALL of us and hang our bodies from the ramparts as a warning.”

“We have ramparts?” Clockblocker said, amused.

“She’ll build ‘em.”

“Not likely,” Kid Win snorted between fits of giggles. “Piggy’s already too busy trying to decide who to strangle first: Shadow Stalker for her screwup, or Armsmaster for his.”

“Yeah, between the parole violation, the bullying scandal, the Trigger Event, and Armsmaster’s little public op-ed, everybody in the tri-state area wants a strip of her hide. She’s gotta be tearing her hair out! The rest of us were good little boys and girls-- it’ll probably be days before she even remembers we exist.” Clockblocker chuckled and hit replay.

“Your highly irrational optimism is refreshing,” Aegis said. “I can’t believe you of all people have forgotten the Two Rules of Crap.”

“The Two Rules of Crap?” Browbeat echoed, puzzled.

Clockblocker’s smirk (his full-face visor was up) turned rueful. “You’re new, so you’re forgiven for not knowing the Two Rules of Crap in the Wards. One: When the stuff hits the fan, it never spreads evenly. Two: No matter how it spreads it always runs downhill.” He sighed. “Still, a guy could hope...”

“So don’t go borrowing trouble we don’t need,” Aegis suggested. “Keep that video off the web.”

“You ought to anyway,” Browbeat added, a look of empathy crossing his face. “The new kid is probably still pretty fragile. She don’t need to see that right now.”

Clockblocker’s smile vanished. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, shutting down the app and closing the laptop. “I wasn’t going to put it online anyway, but-- yeah.” There was one thing you just didn’t jerk people around about when you were a cape: Trigger events. “So how long till we meet the new kid?”

“They said Saturday at the earliest,” Aegis said. “Her mutation is pretty extreme, so it’ll take them a while to clear her medically. The medics and the power wonks are going over her with every scanner and probe they got.”

Kid Win winced. “Better her than us.”

“I heard they were even asking Panacea to come in and take a look,” Browbeat threw in.

Clockblocker froze, so suddenly Aegis almost thought he’d used his power on himself. A slow grin spread across his face. “So after running the gauntlet she’s going to get an official introduction to us this weekend?” he said.

“That’s the plan,” Aegis said.

Clockblocker’s smile grew to unsettling proportions. “And that’s when Vista gets back from her family trip, right?”

“Yes, she… oh boy.”

“Oh man. This is gonna be good...”

 

* * *

 

 

Taylor sat patiently as the technicians and doctors and other PRT staff poked, prodded, and at one point waved booping rods over her. Her father sat next to the examining table, his hand on her withers; men armed with crowbars couldn’t have pried him away. It warmed her heart to know how devoted he was to her… even if he was looking a little poleaxed at the moment. At the moment there was a nurse with a clipboard speaking to them. “...With all that we’ve done so far, we’ve gotten the outlines sketched down of your daughter’s new physiology,” she was saying, “But with your permission, we’ve asked as a special favor for Panacea to come in and take a look.”

“Panacea?” that seemed to pull her father out of whatever world his mind was wandering in. “But I thought she was a healer. How exactly...”

“Panacea’s abilities give her an innate understanding of a person’s biology and biochemistry better than our best scientists and doctors,” the nurse said. “she’ll be able to spot things we never could, give us a general idea of your physical development, any possible medical concerns--”

Taylor’s stomach suddenly growled, loud enough to hear. She blushed brightly enough to see right through the fur on her face. “Dietary needs?” she said meekly.

The nurse laughed. “It has been a long day, hasn’t it. Didn’t they give you anything to eat?”

“I had a plain salad about an hour ago.” Taylor said. “It wasn’t much but it seemed safest.”

“Ah.” The nurse nodded, making a note. “Well, once Panacea looks you over, checks for any food allergies or the like, we can give you the all-clear for a proper meal. So… with your permission?”

Danny nodded. The nurse smiled and hustled over to the door. She leaned out and spoke to someone; a moment later the robed figure of the world’s most famous healer walked in. She was startlingly young; she couldn’t have been any older than Taylor herself. She had dark brown, curly hair that peeked out from under the hood of her white robes, and a scattering of freckles across her face, and despite the professional look of her uniform she looked terribly worn out, with a listless expression and heavy circles under her eyes. She slouched into the room, barely lifting her head.“Okay, I understand you have a new cape here, a case fuuuuu….” her sleepy eyes went wide as they locked onto the miniature lavender unicorn sitting in the center of the room.

“….Yes?” Danny said innocently, gently patting his pony daughter on her shoulder. “Something the matter?”

Taylor scowled up at him. _“Daddee...”_ she hissed, poking him in the ribs with a hoof. _“Stop winding up the world-famous cape healer.”_ She rolled her eyes. Dad Humor. Honestly…

Panacea jumped. “It talks!” she squeaked.

Taylor’s eyebrows tabled. “Yes, it talks,” she said sarcastically. “It also hears.” It had been a long day, and she was getting a little grumpy.

“Yes, ahem.” The lead doctor butted in. “This is Taylor Hebert, age fifteen, she just triggered and--”

“She’s the trigger? A-are you sure a biotinker didn’t make her?” Panacea stalked forward like a cat who’d just seen its first laser dot. She reached out a hand to touch Taylor’s face.

“Hey!” Taylor said, pulling back.

Danny gently, but firmly grabbed the girl’s wrist. “Yes, she’s my daughter,” he said with patient amusement. “The only biotinkering that went into making her involved me and my wife, thank you very much.”

“Daaad!!” Taylor said, mortified.

Taylor’s wasn’t the only face flushing dark. Panacea backed up, hands to her mouth and her cheeks read. “Oh, I-- I’m so sorry-- I apologize, I don’t know what-- It’s just--”

“It’s just you don’t get too many breaks from patching up the same old breaks, bumps and bruises,” Danny said knowingly. “Or to use your power on anything unique or new. And,” he chuckled and looked at his daughter, “This is certainly unique and new.”

Panacea gave him a fleeting smile. “Yes, that’s… true. I’m sorry about that. If I may…?” she asked Taylor, holding out her hand.

“Go ahead,” Taylor said. She leaned her head forward till Panacea’s palm was resting on her forehead, just under her horn. The healer’s eyes fluttered shut for a moment, then back open. “Oh, wow,” she breathed.

“What??” Taylor asked in alarm.

“Your physiology it-- it’s incredible!” Panacea stammered. “It’s perfectly orchestrated to gather, generate, and transmit… s-some sort of energy, I can’t say what--”

“That glowing aura she generates when she uses her telekinesis,” one of the techs standing by said. “It’s giving our propeller-heads fits. The readings might as well say “Bingo Bango Bongo Boingo” for all the sense they make.”

“...Th-the keratin in your hooves, horn, mane, and tail all seem to conduct this energy too,” Panacea went on. “Reactive to it--”

“That would explain why her hair frizzed when one of the techs startled her,” someone muttered.

“Oh, your horn is alive, by the way,” Panacea told Taylor. “It has a nerve fiber in the base and a live root, and apparently grows like a rhino horn or a rodent tooth… slowly, but you may need to file it smooth every few months or so.”

“Important grooming tip, thanks,” Taylor muttered.

“Reproductive cycles are… different,” Panacea said, her brows furrowing as she stared at nothing. “Probably an eleven month pregnancy cycle--”

“NOT going to be an issue,” Taylor said.

“Normal for a horse, though,” someone else said.

“But a monthly waxing and waning fertility cycle--and no menses. Looks like you got spared your monthly visit from Aunt Flo, you lucky little stinker,” Panacea said.

“Nice to know but could we PLEASE move on from my ‘reproductive issues?’” Taylor said on a rising note. “What about dietary? Is chocolate poisonous to me now? Am I going to have to live on grass now or oats or something?”

“Actually… oh good grief...”

“Whaaahahat?” Taylor said. Would she ever stop DOING that?

“Well, you don’t have to worry about chocolate,” Panacea said. It was hard to tell whether she was more amused or annoyed. “Your body can easily handle the theobromides and other toxins that give dogs and cats so much trouble. In fact it can handle toxins way better than a baseline human… or a baseline horse. You not only COULD eat grass and like it, you could nosh down on plants that would kill a horse-- or a human.”

“Really,” Taylor said, impressed.

“What about meat?” Danny asked.

“You and your barbecues...” Taylor said.

Panacea huffed. “Yesss, she can still eat meat and dairy,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “For that matter, normal horses can eat meat too… it takes some time to adjust to it but they can. Her? She could sit down right now and eat a Fugly Bob’s Burger without a hitch.”

“So what’s the catch?” Taylor said.

“What catch?”

“You said ‘oh good grief’ earlier… that no sound good to me.”

Panacea snorted. “It’s just that on top of all the above, your metabolism, your lipid storage and your insulin cycle are practically bulletproof. They can handle mass loads of starches, sugars, and carbohydrates-- in fact they’re turbocharged to run on ridiculous excesses and LIKE it.” She bent down to look the unicorn in the eye. “In layman’s terms you’re custom-built to snarf chocolate cake and ice cream sundaes like they’re going out of style.” She hmmmed. “Even your saliva and tooth enamel are more resistant to decay…”

“Oh, now I’m starting to hate her,” the nurse with the digital clipboard joked. “Someone up there must like you, kid.”

“Someone up there must think it’s adorable to have a little purple unicorn that can practically live on cookies and cake,” Taylor corrected her wryly.

“Part of it might be you have to burn a lot of calories to make that… glowy aura thing you did,” Danny pointed out.

“In part, yeah,” Panacea agreed. “Anyway, your growth cycle… hmh?” she paused, looking puzzled. “Oh… kay… your maturation is about the same as a human-- about 12 to 13 years to the start of puberty, full maturation by about 25… slightly longer lifespan, possibly close to 120 to 150 years--”

“Whoa, that’s good!” Taylor said.

“B-but… I can’t quite put it in words--” Panacea stopped and took a breath. “Okay, it’s… really fuzzy down past a certain point. But the impression that I get is that your ‘species,’ for lack of a better term, has three major possible forms. And that during the first month or so of your gestation-- that is, if you had actually had a gestation-- your form could have gone one of those three possible ways. The form of a unicorn is only one of them.”

“Really?? Then what are the other two?” the lead physician asked.

Panacea rubbed her forehead, vexed. “How would I know?” she said. “Reading a DNA strand to know how it MIGHT have developed is like-- like looking at part of a blueprint for a half finished house that got changed again and again before construction started. Short of cloning her and seeing what the clone grew into-- assuming we could even figure out what the trigger is to select the form-- we can’t tell.

“The real kicker though is that there’s coding here for a-- a conditional metamorphosis.”

Taylors’ eyes went even larger, and Danny’s body went stiff with sudden tension. “You mean I’m going to change AGAIN?” Taylor cried out in dismay.

“NO! No, no no,” Panacea said, shaking her head firmly. Both father and daughter relaxed, but only slightly. “Your physiology is perfectly stable. What you see is what you get.” Danny and Taylor sighed in relief. “But there’s… something here, a sort of switch-- almost a … promise of potential. one that will only activate under _extreme_ duress or environmental conditions. Perhaps a-- larger form? No, not quite---” she sounded frustrated. She squinted at Taylor’s head under her hand as if the answers were written in a too-small font on the unicorn’s brow.

“So okay, I’m some sort of Pokemon or something?” Taylor said, cocking an eyebrow. “I’m going to ‘digivolve’ or whatever? Or possibly could?”

“It’s… not very likely? The sequencing sort of implies one hell of an environmental stressor--- a drastic change-- is needed to cause the paradigm shift...I’m sorry, my power usually isn’t this cryptic,” Panacea complained. “I haven’t hit a no-sell like this since they had me look at Weld-- and he’s made of living metal!”

“It’s okay,” Taylor said sympathetically. The healer looked like she was getting a terrible headache from trying. “You’ve already told us a lot of important stuff we really needed to know.” Her stomach suddenly growled again, making her blush madly. “Speaking of which--”

The techs and physicians all chuckled. “Okay, I think that’s lunch,” the lead said. “Or dinner, considering the time. If you like,” he said to Danny and Taylor, “the Rig has a pretty decent cafeteria. I’m pretty sure they’ll spring for the bill.”

Danny gave him a half-smile. “Sounds good. Sounds good Taylor?”

“Definitely,” Taylor said with relief. She’d been starving for ages, it felt like! She looked up at the healer. “Care to join us?”

Panacea blinked. “I… well yes. Something to eat does sound good right about now. Thank you.” She smiled briefly, as if it pained her. “Call me Amy, by the way.”

Taylor held out a hoof. “Taylor.” Amy shook it, this time with a sincere smile.

The staff of the PRT working out on the Rig were of the highest calibre, and of the highest professional standards. They worked with masked heroes who trusted them implicitly with their anonymity. Discretion was their byword and their personal code.

So naturally the photos of an adorable little lavender unicorn sitting in the Rig cafeteria, eating her way through an enormous hamburger and fry platter and a sundae almost as big as herself, hit the internet within a matter of minutes.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Emily Piggot, director of the Brockton Bay PRT, a jowly woman with a severe haircut and an even more severe scowl etched permanently on her face, sat behind her desk and glowered like a basilisk at the two leaders of the Brockton Bay Protectorate. She was not amused. She was never amused. But current events had her less amused than ever before. Her current level of amusement could be annotated in negative numbers. “So would either of you care to explain to me,” she said in the dulcet tones of someone who had spent the past 24 hours chewing nails and tearing hair, “why our illustrious Armsmaster decided to do an impromptu on-air interview and turn our intercession in a Trigger Event, something which should have been an easy PR coup for us, into a screaming public relations disaster?”

Miss Militia was seated casually across the desk from her. Armsmaster, in a none-too-subtle show of defiance, had refused a seat and was standing, staring out the picture window, sunlight gleaming off his blue and silver armor. “I’m not retracting my statement,” he said without looking at her.

“You will if I say you do,” Piggot said, her temper flaring. “Even if I have to stand behind you, mimic your voice and move your lips with my finger.” She rapped on the desk with her knuckles absently. “Armsmaster, you stood on live TV and informed the people of Brockton Bay that their darling, angel children were all, quote ‘worthless little shits.’ Tell me that isn’t going to bite us in the arse.”

“That is a gross distortion of my words,” Armsmaster said, his lips a thin line.

“Which is exactly what they’ll do with those words-- are _already_ doing with those words!” Piggot leaned back in her seat, grimacing as her ruined kidneys twinged.

“And they were exactly what needed to be said,” Miss Militia said.

Piggot’s eyebrows raised. “And how do you figure that?”

“Director, I don’t expect someone who is never in the field to be aware of things as we are,” the patriot-themed cape began. Piggot bristled at the reminder of her permanent state as a PRT desk jockey, but held her tongue and let her continue. “But you read the dossier, you saw the photographs and the footage. What was done to Taylor Hebert by those girls-- by the entire school, staff included, was… obscene. And what’s more horrible is that this event was actually the culmination of a year-long campaign of cruelty--”

“Aided and abetted by the school administration’s willful apathy,” Armsmaster bit out. Piggot’s eyebrows rose further. She’d rarely seen Armsmaster so agitated about something.

“It not only needed to be said to the little assholes,” Miss Militia added with a sardonic tone to her voice, “It was in our best interests to express outrage and disgust at the whole thing, and as bluntly as possible.” Her brows furrowed. “Because, in case you forgot, Director, we are at least partially complicit in the whole affair. We were the ones who placed a highly questionable probationary Ward in that school. We were the ones the school staff thought they were pandering to when they hushed up the activities of Sophia Hess and her friends. And after today’s little media circus, to say nothing of the few hundred cell phone videos that are going to hit the internet over the next few days, anyone with the IQ of a _gerbil_ is going to figure out that Shadow Stalker, the Protectorate Ward, is also Sophia Hess-- the leader of the most notorious group of bullies since they dumped a bucket of pig’s blood from the gym rafters in _Carrie.”_

Piggot made a sound somewhere between a snarl and a groan and rubbed her temples. She was defeated and knew it. “Could you at least have found a more diplomatic way to distance us from that?” she almost pleaded. “Did you have to let ARMSMASTER speak to the Press unfiltered?”

“Honestly, not without sounding mealy-mouthed,” Miss Militia said. She refrained from pointing out she didn’t ‘allow’ Armsmaster to do anything. “Tell me, Director; would you expect him--” she jerked a thumb over her shoulder “--to be diplomatic?”

“No,” Piggot admitted bluntly. “I’d expect him to sound like he was reading off a teleprompter if he tried.” Armsmaster made a few grumbling noises himself at that.

“Neither would anyone else,” Miss Militia said. Her eyes crinkled slightly in amusement. “In fact it’s expected of him to be utterly tactless.”

“I’m right here, you know,” Armsmaster said.

“So basically it works out that what we needed to say got said, in the way it needed to be said, by the one person who could get away with saying it.” Miss Militia’s amusement faded. “And within earshot of the one person we sincerely needed to hear it most: Taylor herself.”

Something in the heroine’s voice caught Piggot’s attention. “And why do you think it’s so important that the PRT curry favor with a talking plush toy?” she asked.

Armsmaster turned from the window and walked to her desk. He pulled two glass jars from a compartment on his belt and set them on her desk blotter. One contained a handful of red and white flower petals. The other had holes crudely punched in the lid, and held a vividly colored, living butterfly. “These are rose petals,” he said, tapping one lid, then the other. “and this is a butterfly; a Holly Blue, by species.”

“And?”

“This morning they were a rotting tampon and a cockroach, respectively,” he said. “I can show you helmet cam footage of the precise moment of their metamorphosis.”

“When I was tending to Taylor during her emotional breakdown, she emitted a pulse of that strange energy of hers,” Miss Militia said. “The wave encompassed the entire school. We have techs going over the building with a fine toothed comb, but so far it seems all that was metamorphosed was the bugs and filth from the locker, including the remnant clinging to her own skin.” She held up an evidence bag with a few flower petals inside. “More red and white rose petals. Kind of symbolic, don't you think?"

“I thought you said she was a telekinetic!” Piggot sputtered in alarm. “She’s capable of transmutation, too?” She refused to say biokinesis. It was too alarming to even think on. Someone with the power to transmogrify things at range, without even line of sight, over an unknown area... the implications were frightening beyond measure.

“And who knows what else,” Armsmaster added. “The scans so far indicate this energy field of hers is… exotic beyond imagining.”

“She knows Sophia is Shadow Stalker,” Armsmaster went on. “She could hardly not figure it out, seeing as she went from being stuffed in a locker by her to thrashing her up one end of the school and down the other. It’s in our favor that we were quick to respond and that we moved to help her; that means she saw us as on her side right from the beginning. And right now she’s probably still a little shell shocked from all that’s happened to her. But the instant things settle down and she has time to think things over, she’ll start making connections.

“If she decides we’re still on her side, we’ll get a new and fantastically powerful member of the Wards. If she decides that the past two years of suffering were our fault, then the explosion we saw at Winslow could be small potatoes.”

“To say nothing of what her father could do to us,” Miss Militia couldn’t help adding, even as Piggot groaned and covered her face with her hands. “In case you missed it, Danny Hebert is in charge of the Dockworker’s Union, and a political gadfly in his own right. If he gets it in his head, he could raise a public stink like nothing you’ve ever seen.

“‘Protectorate covers up Ward criminal behavior,’” she said, making quote marks in the air as if reading a headline. “’The big bad heartless PRT verses the poor little cute crying unicorn girl.’ How bad an aneurysm would Glenn Chambers have, do you think?”

“And what do you recommend?” Piggot hissed, sourly admitting defeat.

“How about the novel approach of ‘the truth’?” Miss Militia said cynically. “Look, the only way we can do it is if we just do it straight. Tell everything. All at once. Like ripping off a bandaid. We let the Heberts know everything, make it clear that we had a failure in our chain of command…”

“No fooling,” Piggot said dryly. “I know a certain Ward handler who’s getting thrown under the bus.”

“We come down on Shadow Stalker with both feet,” Armsmaster added. “No shipping her off to another district with a name change, no quiet shuffling away. Her family goes under witness protection and she goes straight to Juvenile Hall.”

“Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars,” Miss Militia said smugly.

“The Chief Director may give us trouble on that,” Piggot said. “The whole reason we gave Shadow Stalker probationary status was because she insisted the girl’s abilities were just too useful.”

“They’re still useful,” Armsmaster said curtly. “But she’ll keep in the Cooler just as well as anywhere else.”

Piggot nodded and gave a grimace that could almost pass for a smile. “Fair enough.”

“And we make a point of cutting a sweetheart deal with the Heberts,” Miss Militia added. “Compensation for our part in her pain and suffering. Even if it’s a token gesture, it’s still a gesture, and should be made.

“The upper management will quibble over that,” Armsmaster said. “Say that it’s too self-incriminating, or the like. Make it a few extra pluses on her eventual contract with the Wards; extra pay or benefits-- say that it’s due to her unique physical needs, her inability to maintain a secret identity, etc.”

Piggot nodded slowly. “We already do something like that for the few Case 53s we have on board,” she said. “That will at least pass muster...” She sighed and shook her head. “I can’t find any reason not to do it the way you suggest. I’m just not looking forward to the ruckus-- or the red tape-- that’s going to cut loose when we do.” her expression soured.

“Look on the bright side, Director,” Miss Militia said, her eyes crinkling again. “Once she signs up we are going to make a MINT on merchandising.”


	3. Chapter 3

“And if you will sign here, and here,” the PRT office worker said. Danny carefully signed, then slid the paper sideways to his daughter, who picked up the pen with her hoof and signed with a cheerful flourish--

She picked up the pen in her hoof--

She picked up the pen--

In her hoof--

 

Taylor “Ladybird” Hebert sat there staring at her hoof, the pen clinging to the frog. “Wait. What?” She held it over the desk and dropped it. Then she picked it up again.

Danny and the desk lady blinked. “How...”

“Oh, right,” Taylor said suddenly. “Pan-- I mean Amy-- did say that my hooves conducted my power, too. I guess that gives me, er, grippy hooves?”

“Oh. Okay. I guess?” Danny scratched his head. “Still looks a bit odd.”

The desk lady cleared her throat. “Well, anyway. Let me be the first to say congratulations, and welcome to the Brockton Bay Wards…. Ladybird.”

“Why thank you very much,” Taylor… Ladybird… said with a smirk. She stood on the seat of her chair and gave a little pony-style curtsey. Danny and the secretary chuckled and applauded. “So what next?”

“I’m afraid Mr. Hebert can’t accompany you beyond this point,” the lady behind the desk said, getting to her feet. “We’ll be dealing with a lot of internal security matters, not the least of which is meeting your new teammates unmasked.”

“Ah, I understand,” Danny said with a weak smile. “And I’ve been here too long as it is. The Docks won’t run themselves forever.”

Taylor put a hoof on his leg. “I’ll be fine, Daddy,” she said, giving him her best brave-girl smile. “Besides I’ve got--”

“Call me Madelyne,” the office worker said.

“I’ve got Madelyne to look after me, right? Besides. I’m gonna be a superhero. I can handle whatever comes next.”

Danny crouched down and gave his transformed daughter a long hug. She threw a hoof over his shoulder and hugged him back. “You be good, Little Owl,” he said in her ear.

“I will...”

He patted her hair a couple of times. “Hmmm. Soft.”

“Daaad…!”

Danny chuckled. “Hey, couldn’t help it.” He got up to go. “I’ll be back tomorrow evening.”

“Bye..” Taylor followed him with her eyes as he walked out the door and down the hall-- quickly, and without looking back. _Just like he did on my first day of Kindergarten,_ she remembered. She turned to Madelyne. “So… what next?”

“Next, I believe, you get to go over to the PRT and meet your new teammates,” Madelyne said over her shoulder as she finished running the papers through the computer scanner. She paced off down the hall, Taylor trotting in her wake. “You’ll love them, they’re a good bunch of kids… er, well...”

“We know about Shadow Stalker,” Taylor said, a trifle grimly. “We also know she’s not a problem anymore.” It had been two days of exams, tests, and paper-filling, but during that time they had kept informed. Director Piggot was sending Sophia Hess, aka Shadow Stalker, on her way to a stay in Juvie, and she wasn’t taking the slow boat to China about it either. They had met very briefly with the woman; she was an intimidating figure to say the least. But she had made it clear that she was solidly on Taylor’s side in this mess, which was a lifetime more than could be said for Principal Blackwell back in Winslow. “All the same,” she went on. “off the record… is there anyone I should look out for?”

The secretary hesitated. She made a point looking around the hallway before answering. She leaned over the desk in a conspiratorial fashion. “Truthfully-- Armsmaster can be a bit stiff. And Director Piggot can be a real hardcase… but so long as you stick to the rules and don’t go out of your way to tick them off, and don’t waste their time, they’re no problem. The only one I’d really worry about is Director Calvert.”

“What about him?” Taylor asked.

“Nothing in particular,” the woman said, biting her lip. “Mind, it’s only a personal impression. But he gives off this...oily air. Sleazy. Like you want to wash your hand after shaking his…That's just a woman's intuition speaking. That he's the sort of man who’s used to getting his way, and not too particular about how he gets it.” She shrugged it off. “Not that it should matter much, he’s not even close to your chain of command, so you should rarely even see him, much less have to worry about him.”

Taylor nodded in relief. After all that had happened, she really didn’t need to go through a round of inter-office drama. “Um, anything else.”

The secretary half-grinned, half-winced. “Well, there is Glenn Chambers. He’s the head of the Public Relations department and he…”

“Wait. Is he the one responsible for Glamour Girl out in Vegas having to wear gold lame’ and high-heel platforms into combat?” Taylor said with fatalistic apprehension.

The secretary nodded. “He’s… yeah. I haven’t heard a hero or heroine yet who hasn’t complained at the top of their lungs about him.” She looked down at Taylor and sighed. “At least he can’t jerk you around about your costume design, sweetie...”

Taylor frowned. “My costume design?”

“Well, you’re...” the secretary waved her hand up and down, indicating Taylor in the altogether.

Taylor’s enormous eyes went even rounder. Her pupils turned to pinpricks.

“OHSWEETMERCIFULCRAP I’M _**NAKED!!!”**_

 

* * *

 

 

The next few minutes found a small enclave gathered around the nearest bathroom door. “Ladybird, please come back out,” Madelyne said patiently to the door. “You have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“You mean besides spending the last several days running around completely starkers?” the door shouted back.

“Well she has a layer of fur-- ouch!”

One of the orderlies had spoken up; Madelyne had jabbed him with her pen. “Not helping,” she said. “Really, Ladybird, you’re making a big deal out of it. Nobody saw anything.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Actually nobody _could_ see anything,” the lead powers researcher said, not looking up from his datapad. The others stared at him. He noticed the looks. “What? Didn’t you notice?”

“Notice what?” Taylor said from inside the bathroom. Ponies apparently had very good hearing.

The lead powers researcher leaned in toward the door. “Ladybird, look at yourself in the mirror,” he said. He had the air of someone who knew something nobody else had noticed.

There was a moment of silence. “Doctor Micheals,” Taylor said with exaggerated patience, “Do you know where the mirrors are usually located in a bathroom?”

“Er, above the sink?”

“And how tall am I, again?”

“She’s never seen herself in a mirror yet? I hope she washes her hooves after she-- Ow! Quit it.” Madelyne had stabbed the orderly again.

“Oh, er, right. Someone go fetch a full-length mirror? There has to be one around here somewhere, capes are all clothes-horses...” The orderly hustled off. Possibly for a mirror, possibly to escape Madelyne’s pen. He returned with a tall dressing room mirror in tow. “Okay, Ladybird? Taylor? If you’ll just come out for a moment… I promise, there’s nobody here but us medical types. And Madelyne of course, but you know her.”

The door creaked open and a small lavender unicorn hustled out, cringing, her tail tucked underneath her. “Okay, take a look at yourself,” Doctor Micheals instructed. The orderly set the mirror on the floor and held it up. Sulking and fussing, Taylor faced the mirror. Her ears pricked up in surprise and her rump thumped on the floor. “Holy crap!”

“What?”

“I’m… cute!” Taylor said. “I mean, ridiculous cute. I want to give myself a teddy bear, a hug and a cookie!” She sounded as if she didn’t know whether to be horrified or not.

Dr. Micheals rubbed his finger fiercely over his mustache as he struggled not to laugh. “Well yes, we’ve noticed. But notice anything else?” Taylor stopped staring at herself in the mirror to look at him. “Go on, stand up. Turn in a circle and look yourself over.

Taylor obeyed. “….AAAH! I’m a kewpie doll!” She turned in a circle, then reared up on her haunches and looked down her belly. “Where’d everything… I mean everything was there the last time I went to the bathroom--” She realized what she was doing and fell down to the floor in a huddled crouch. She gave everyone a look. “Just a second. Iiii… gotta check something--” she backed into the bathroom and slammed the door.

“Wait. There everything… uh, I mean… okay, what the heck?”

“Remember what Panacea told you about conductive keratins?” Dr. Micheals said through the door. The door opened and Taylor stuck her head out. “Your fur is apparently projecting a, ahh, modesty-protecting mirage of sorts over your epidermis that camouflages certain areas of your body. Much like Narwhal does with her skin-tight layer of force fields.”

“So what you’re saying is that I’m basically dressed in unicorn pony magic?” Taylor said.

“Well, if saying it that way helps...” he shrugged expressively. “Yes, I suppose.”

Taylor sighed. At least she hadn’t been streaking everybody for the past two or three days. “Okay, but maybe it’s my imagination, but I’m starting to feel a draft in here,” she complained. She used her telekinesis to pull a towel from a nearby cart and threw it over herself like a shawl, so only her head and forehooves were exposed. “Could I please have _something_ …?”

“Like what, a doggy sweater?… OW! Dangit already!”

Madelyne suddenly snapped her manicured fingers. “I know just the thing! Be right back!” She trotted off down the hall, her high heels clicking. Everyone stood around looking awkward for about ten minutes; then she came clickity-clacking back. She was holding something that looked a bit like a soft, off-white cloak… only it looked hand made, had a couple of buttons and a fringe, and seemed to be knitted or crocheted.

“What is it?” Taylor asked, cocking her head to one side.

Madelyne held it up. “It’s a shawl,” she said. “My mother made it. It’s not really my look, but it’s just the right size...” she knelt down, whipped off the towel Taylor had donned and threw the shawl over her. “see, we button it around the tail and down the back, and then we tied it off around the neck-- perfect!” Madelyne regarded her handiwork. “Not half bad… at least it’ll do till the costume monkeys come up with something more suiting.

Taylor regarded herself in the mirror. It covered her up like one of those-- what were they anyway, those cover things race horses were put in off the track?-- but it draped on her a bit, coming down to her knees in the front and her hocks in the back. It almost looked like she was wearing a dress. A little-old-lady dress cut for miniature ponies, but still-- far better than nothing.

“How does it feel?”

“Better,” Taylor sighed. It did feel better to be clothed in some fashion. People got used to walking around in open-backed hospital gowns, she supposed; she could get used to this. “It’s comfortable anyway.”

“Excellent. Okay, I think we’ve kept the Wards waiting long enough…? We have to catch a chopper out to the PRT base; that’s where the Wards HQ is...

 

* * *

 

 

Life was suck, Missy Biron decided. Work was suck, mandatory vacation time was suck, EVERYTHING was suck. She slouched into the elevator and hit the button for the floor for the Wards quarters.

It was all Piggot’s fault, she decided. It was Missy’s father who’d gotten it in his head to be “impulsive,” rent an RV, and take the whole family to Disneyworrrrrrld(blegh) over the Christmas Break on some sort of “fix the family” outing. But it was Piggot who had signed off on Missy’s leave from the Wards-- who had made it _mandatory_ \-- that she go on this horrible trip to Disneyworrrrrld(blegh) with her family. Had shot down every effort Missy had made to sign up for extra duties, extra patrols, Console Duty, ANYTHING--(where was an Endbringer attack when you needed it?) to justify not going along with this _incredibly bad_ _idea_ _._

So Missy had gotten the _excruciating_ pleasure of spending several days trapped in a cramped RV on a road trip to Florida and back with two alleged adults that couldn’t stand each other anymore and who were probably plotting right now how to murder each other with their souvenir Mickey Mouse ears.

Disneyworrrrrld(blegh) had been no better. The park had been crowded, Missy lost track of how many attractions were shut down for repairs thanks to some Tinker villain LOSER who had tried to hold the entire park hostage the week before by using his weird remote-control powers to sabotage one ride after another till they paid him off… the local Protectorate had caught the LOSER, but not before he’d ruined dozens of computerized rides and games… the rides that had still been running had made Missy nauseous, and her parents had spent the whole time either fighting with each other or complaining how much everything cost. And Vista had to force herself not to suplex some of the more annoying costumed characters.

And now she was back, feeling like something the cat dragged in and then threw back out, getting ready to meet the newest member of the Protectorate ENE Wards. Apparently about three days ago some oh-so-lucky kid had a trigger event at Winslow High, and for whatever reason she was being express-shipped straight into Ward membership. Hurray, a newbie. And one who was still probably a shaking mess from their trigger event.

She sighed and adjusted her visor. Yup. Another day of suck.

The elevator doors swooshed open. She looked around the enormous domed room that made up the hub of the Ward HQ. Yup, just like she left it. Everyone was gathered in the main break area it looked like.

Then she clapped eyes on what was sitting in the middle of the couch and felt the air whoosh out of her lungs. For the first time since joining the Wards her eyes were fixed on something _other_ than Gallant. It was little, it was lavender purple, it had cute little hooves and big adorable eyes and tumbling black locks of mane and tail and a dinky spiral horn from its forehead and it was the most perfectly wonderful thing that Vista had ever SEEN--

 

* * *

 

 

Taylor sat on the couch and chattered amicably with the other Wards. Things were actually going well; after getting over the awkwardness of introductions and her own shyness… and the totally unique awkwardness for everyone of holding a conversation with a talking mythical beast… they all opened up. Snacks and soda had been broken out and something of a makeshift “welcome to the team” party had taken shape. Gallant and Aegis were rather polite and charming, Kid Win was energetic and friendly, Clockblocker had an eccentric sense of humor, Browbeat was bluff but soft-spoken… they all went out of their way to make the new member feel welcome.

Still, Taylor got the odd feeling that they were waiting-- some like Clockblocker, on pins and needles-- for something to happen.

There was a chime from the elevator and the whoosh of doors opening. Clockblocker broke off in the middle of his story (something about a nun and a penguin) and looked up. “Ah, there she is,” he said with a crap eating grin.

Taylor stared at him “What--”

“OmigoshOmigoshOHMYGOOOOOOSSSSSSSH!”

WHUMP!

Without warning Taylor was hit amidships by a fast moving projectile. She got a brief impression of green cloth and blonde hair, and she suddenly had a twelve year old girl clinging to her like a limpet, seriously squeezing the stuffing out of her. “Ohmygosh she’sadorable ohgoshogosh a REAL LIVE UNICORN did some biotinker _make_ herIcan’t _believe_ arealliveunicorn canwekeepher--”

"Uh," Aegis waved his hand in the air helplessly. “Vista, this is Ladybird.”

The gleeful little girl looked up at him as she petted the lavender unicorn with one hand while nearly strangling her with the other arm. “oh is that her name? Is she our new mascot?”

“Um, actually, I’m your new teammate,” Taylor said.

“Ladybird,” Aegis said blithely. “Allow me to introduce Vista.”

The transformation of Vista’s face from childlike glee to horrified dismay was heartbreaking.

 

* * *

 

She was still sitting in the kitchen area a half hour later, back turned to the door. Taylor stuck her head in the doorway and sighed at the sight of the twelve year old Ward. She was hunched up on a kitchen chair, eating her way through a box of ginger cookies, sulking and miserable.

It was only after she had bolted from the break room literally shrieking in embarrassment that the others had broken down and gave Taylor the full story. After they had stopped laughing anyway (that idiot Clockblocker was still giggling over the photos he’d taken on his cellphone.)

Apparently Vista had triggered with her space-altering powers at something like the age of NINE, and had been a Ward ever since. She was consequently both the youngest member of the Wards and the one with the most seniority. But since the PRT rules said that rank was by age… well, she’d spent the last four years being ordered around by capes with one-tenth her experience, then watching them graduate to full Protectorate status-- only to have a brand new, inexperienced cape come in and replace them as leader and start ordering her around as well.

On top of that apparently she had Triggered due to the fact that her parents were a pair of selfish, immature, overgrown children who were constantly fighting and perpetually on the fringe of divorce, and like most poor children put in that situation she’d taken it upon herself to somehow try and pull her broken family together.

Throw in a horrendous crush on Gallant on top of that, one that Vista thought nobody knew about but everybody did...

To say she was a bit precocious as a consequence was an understatement. Her frustrations had made her constantly obsessed with being thought of as “mature” (hence the breastplate on her armor that she kept trying to make a bit more “breast” than “plate”) and was constantly posturing like she was a thirty year old veteran of the wars. She hated being called little or cute, she hated having to wear the skirted costume that made her look like a little girl (she was allegedly plotting to someday poison Glenn Chambers’ egg McMuffin), and she absolutely hated being caught acting like a little girl.

The fact that she _was_ a little girl had zero persuasive force with her.

Taylor clip-clopped a few steps into the kitchen. Vista obviously heard her. “Don’t look at me,” she muttered.

Taylor sighed. She’d already had her dignity upturned a half-dozen times this week; one more time wouldn’t hurt. At least for a good cause. She trotted over, sat down next to the stool, and leaned against the girl’s leg. “Hard day?” she said, looking up at her.

Vista nodded. Taylor could practically see the girl struggling with the urge to reach down and pet her. She decided to up the ante and rested her head across the girl’s lap, pushing the box of cookies aside. “Ear skritchies,” she commanded.

“Hey!” Vista protested, catching the cookie box.

“Hay is for dinner," Taylor joked. "Ear skritchies now.” Vista looked conflicted, then gave in to the inevitable, digging her fingers carefully into the mane around her ears. Taylor smiled; it actually felt rather nice. Her hind hoof started tapping in time on the tile floor. “Mmm, I’m starting to see why dogs and cats like this so much,” she said. This elicited a giggle from Vista. Progress! “My code name’s Ladybird, but you can call me Taylor,” she said.

“Um, really? Why Ladybird?” Wordlessly Taylor lit up her horn (eliciting a gasp of surprise from Vista) and lifted the hem of her shawl, revealing the ladybug on her hip. “Oh, neat,” Vista said, blinking. Taylor let the hem drop.

“My code name’s Vista, but my real name’s Missy,” Vista said.

“Sorta caught that,” Taylor replied. Missy’s face flushed red under her visor.

“I’m sorry I did that,” she muttered.

“Eh, I’m probably going to have to get used to it,” Taylor said. “I’m little, I’m cute-- adorable if I do say so myself-- “ she fluttered her lashes and smirked; Vista giggled. “and people are going to treat me a certain way.”

Vista’s expression soured. “Gee, that sounds familiar,” she muttered.

Taylor poked her with a hoof. “Hey, no pouting,” she said. “At least you’ll grow out of it. And it’s not all that bad, you know.”

“Really,” Missy said, her voice dripping cynicism.

“Yeah really. At least this way people are nice to me… or at least they aren’t freaking out screaming that I’m a monster. Which would YOU rather be: a cute and cuddly pony or something that looked like a naked mole rat?”

Missy grimaced. “What’s a naked mole rat??”

“Picture a rat that looks like someone turned it inside out,” Taylor said, amused.

“Ew!”

“Besides, sooner or later people will start respecting me for who I am, not just what I look like,” she said. “It just takes time.”

“Too MUCH time,” Vista muttered, thinking of a certain armor-clad Ward and blushing slightly.

“So? There’s no big rush. Till then I’ll enjoy what I have. Heck, I’m gonna exploit the heck out of it.” She looked up. “Now gimme a cookie.”

Vista giggled, tried to smother it, then gave up. “Get your own cookies, Ladybird.”

“But you have cookies right here and now,” Taylor said. She gave Missy the biggest puppy dog eyes she could manage and a wibbling lower lip. “Cookieeee...”

“Okay, okay,” Missy said, finally giggling openly. She pulled a cookie out of the pack and stuck it in the pony’s open mouth.

“Araarnum. Mmm, Good cookie,” Taylor said with her mouth full. She munched happily.

“You’re more immature than I am,” Missy teased, giggling fit to bust now. “How old ARE you?”

“Oh, fifteen,” Taylor said. “Practically an old woman.”

“Is this how practically old women act?” Missy said sarcastically.

“Whenever they want to. What’s the point of growing up if you can’t act like a little kid whenever you want to? ‘When I was a child, I acted as a child; when I grew up I put away childish things… including the childish need to be thought of as ever-so-grown-up,” she paraphrased her favorite quote from C.S. Lewis, giving the younger Ward a knowing grin.

Missy huffed. “They sent you in here to give me some sort of lecture on being “a normal kid,” didn’t they,” she mocked, making quote marks in the air and rolling her eyes. Her voice was full of the longsuffering of any child anywhere about being lectured by grownups. One minute they complained about you being immature, then they complained about you being too mature. It would be nice if they made up their minds.

Taylor shrugged. “I came in here because this is where the cookies are. Speaking of which: cookie.” Another cookie was popped in her mouth. “Fanks. Nom. …..Aaaaaand because you were here, and you were upset, and I felt kind of bad about that.” She finished her cookie. “So, you feel better?”

Vista dimpled. “A little.”

“Come back out with me?” Vista hesitated. “Come on, you aren’t gonna leave me alone out there with a bunch of doofus GUYS are you?….they’re talking about ordering in some pizza,” she tempted.

Missy snorted. “We’d better head back out there then and run an intercept. Kid Win puts pineapple on everything. Gak.”

“Can’t have that,” Ladybird agreed with a chuckle. The two got to their feet and ambled to the door.

“Can you eat pizza?” Vista asked in curiosity.

“Sure. I can eat pretty much anything. I’m a little four-legged trash compactor...”

On the way out the door Taylor looked over her shoulder and saw Gallant leaning, semi-casually, against the wall outside the kitchen. He gave her a covert thumbs up. Taylor gave him a smile in return, then went back to answering the youngest Ward’s question about unicorns.

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

Glenn Chambers was a thoroughly unpleasant man; the sort of human slug that sent any halfway decent soul mentally questing for the nearest supply of table salt. He was a heavily obese man with a carefully cultivated neckbeard and a hairdo best described as a gelled “faux-hawk.” He wore thick, rectangular glasses that amplified his piggish squint and dressed in deliberately unflattering, ill-fitting clothing. His entire persona was built around looking, acting and being “artfully” ill-kempt to show off his social status; that of someone who considered themselves artistically elevated above the petty standards of things like appearance, presentation, manners or, to judge by the aroma of stale fast food around him, hygeine. His manner was deliberately cloying and overweening, invasive of other people’s personal space-- his every action carefully performed to transgress almost, but not quite, to the point of getting punched or slapped. He quite obviously imagined himself clever for this “calculated” presentation of himself, and thought that the sycophants that clustered in his wake as he moved through the oh-so-rarified atmosphere of Public Relations constituted proof of his genius and charisma.

In other words, Glenn Chambers was a delusional, narcissistic ass.

He was also the head of Public Relations and Image Department for the PRT and the Protectorate, and a festering pain in the arse for every single Cape. His “innovations” in their appearance, equipment and tactics consisted of truckling to every cliche’, base stereotype and schizoid focus group dribble, and shoehorning heroes into the mould thus designed. Some of his more genius “suggestions” consisted of telling a darkness-powered and themed hero to dress in brighter colors “to be more accessible to the kids,” giving thumbs down to an entire line of impact, incision and fire resistant Tinker-made costumes because “focus groups don’t like red,” and continually trying to coerce every female cape into wearing plunging necklines and high heels in combat.

He was a pain to the adult heroes, but he was a nightmare to the Wards, because the Wards had next to zero control over their own image and the PRT had basically took leave of its senses and signed it all over to Glenn Chambers. As such there was a low-level war going on between his department that wanted to dumb down the Wards’ image till they were stupider than “Teen Titans Go”, and the Wards themselves who wanted to be effective, competent and most of all to live through their time in the Wards, or at least die with dignity.

It was Glenn Chambers who refused to let Vista carry any sort of weapon to defend herself in the field, not even a police baton. It was Glenn Chambers who fought against any Wards carrying any gear that even remotely looked like a gun. It was Glenn Chambers who decided that belts and belts of pouches were “in”--- not actual utility belts, just belts and straps of pouches too small to carry anything--- and forced them to wear miles of the damn things for over a month before they threatened to revolt. It was Glenn Chambers who decided Kid Win should look like a weenier version of the late tinker Hero, and that he should ride a flying skateboard because “the kids were into them.” (The next time he’d had a suggestion, he’d shown up with a razor scooter and a pair of Heelies. Chambers still had no idea how close it came to bloodshed.) He’d obstructed holdout weapons, utility belts, better armor, even more protective helmets because he thought they’d interfere with “image.”

Arguably worst of all was his almost toxic predilection for dressing the girl wards as if they were either five years younger or ten years older than their actual age. There were rumors that he had an entire line of sailor fukus hanging in a closet somewhere… just waiting.

Ladybird had been told all of these stories, some with relish, some with horror, some with outright seething rage. Still, she had been hard to convince that any spin doctor could truly be half as horrendous as they described. But the moment she walked her little lavender heinie into Glenn Chambers’ office and saw the way his piggy little eyes lit up, she believed every word of it and more.

He was in the middle of horking down a bagful of breakfast McFood-- another affectation; the PRT cafeteria was right downstairs. He had one of his interns do burger runs to the local burger chain (not even Fugly Bob’s, the philistine) just so he could be seen eating it. “Aaaah, Miss Hebert, come in, come in,” he said, his eyes and little round teeth gleaming. He motioned her to a seat with the hand not holding an egg and sausage muffin.

With as much dignity as she could muster she climbed up into the seat, adjusting her shawl around her. Truth be told, she was starting to feel a little silly wearing the thing everywhere. It just seemed outright superfluous sometimes. Sitting here in front of Glenn Chambers with that creepy look on his face, though, she was starting to feel underdressed again. He plunked his half-eaten breakfast sandwich on his desk and literally clapped his pudgy hands with glee. “Oh, this is perfect!” he squealed. “Ladybird, selling your image is going to be the biggest success of my career, I just know it!”

“That’s… nice?” Taylor said.

“Oh yes,” he said. “You’re practically perfect to be the new face of the Wards.”

Taylor cocked an eyebrow. “The new face of the Wards?” She gave an awkward little laugh. “I’m not sure the Wards would want to be represented by a cute little lavender unicorn.”

Glenn gave a dismissive wave. “It’s just common sense,” he said. “The nature of your transformation-- well I’m sure it was rather traumatic, but there’s simply no denying the sheer _marketability._ The plush toy sales alone...” he took a hasty bite of his breakfast sandwich and started tapping away at his desktop computer.

Taylor sighed. She’d seen this coming about a lightyear away. “Sir, I know I’m… cute and cuddly… but I really feel I can make a genuine contribution to both the Wards and the Protectorate beyond _toy sales._ The powers testing staff said my abilities put me in the ninetieth percentile, easily. My telekinetic abilities alone give me a shaker/blaster rating of at least--”

“Yes yes yes, I’m quite sure,” Chambers said, not looking away from the files flicking across his screen. “But powers aren’t everything, Miss Hebert. Some people are just simply suited for a particular role in the team dynamic. I mean, if you look at Vista’s rating alone you’d say she was perfect for front-line work.” He scoffed.

“Yes,” Ladybird said scathingly. “I know.” It was a massive sore point with Vista, and even with the rest of the team… Vista had the most training and experience of all of them, and had a power, the ability to expand or shrink linear dimensions, that would make even a complete novice a force to be reckoned with. Yet PRT policy and Glenn Chamber’s rules about “image” kept her stuck as “the cute little girl in the back” and conspired to keep her off the field, even for patrols-- making the team as a whole less effective when it counted most.

“There, you see?” Glenn went on. “She’d be terrible for actual _field work_ as a cape. I’ve never seen a focus group that had anything good to say about a young girl as an actual cape--”

“That’s funny,” said Taylor brightly. “I’ve never seen a focus group that had anything worth saying at all.”

He paused in his typing and gave her a sidelong, sour look. “Like it or not, Ladybird, we all live or die by popular opinion,” he said pompously. “Ignore it at your peril.”

“Last month _popular opinion_ was that I should die alone, trapped in a locker full of rotting tampons,” Taylor said, her voice like acid dipped in liquid nitrogen. “I don’t have much use these days for _popular opinions_.” _Or people who make their living groveling to them,_ she thought with sizzling viciousness.

Glenn took advantage of the rather chilly silence to take another bite of his cold sandwich. “There’s no call for that attitude, Miss Hebert,” he said, spraying crumbs and giving her a condescending look through half lidded eyes… an effect rather ruined by how squinty his eyes were. “We’re here to _help_ you, to make sure you have the best public likability index numbers we can manage.”

 _Did he just use the royal “we?”_ Taylor sighed, but said nothing.

“Very good,” Glenn said, as if everything had been settled. “Now it’s obvious that you’ll be coupled with Vista as often as possible. I mean, the role is self-writing; the cute youngest hero and--”

“And her pet?” Taylor said calmly.

Too calmly, Glenn Chambers might have noted, if he had been nearly as smart as he thought he was. Instead of noting the growing danger, he merely nodded eagerly, jowls flapping. “Team mascot, icon, whatever. That general paradigm."

“Sort of like Chim-Chim the Monkey in Speed Racer,” Taylor said, her teeth bared in… something like a smile.

“Exactly! There to give morale support to the team,” Glenn said. “Of course we’ve got an entire line of products and gear and clothing for you to wear in public appearances, to support the merchandising line of course.”

“Of couuuurse...”

“Here we go--” He turned his flatscreen monitor so she could see. Taylor barely avoided flinching in horror. They had done a 3d mockup of her, and then dressed it in-- well, she’d never seen so many ribbons, bows and ruffles. Or such a vivid shade of peach. “Of course there’s quite a wide selection,” he said, clicking through image after image of ruffles, frills, furbelows and crinolines in every hue found in nature and several colors probably only achieved through illegal scientific experimentation. Some looked like ridiculous parodies of “active wear” or “formal wear” that no sane being, biped or quadruped, would wear in public save as a joke. “Bright colors, of course, to--”

“Increase my approachability,” she finished for him. “Right. Mister Chambers,” she said, this is-- all of this is just unacceptable! I didn’t sign up with the Wards to be a… ugh, I hate myself for saying it… _clothes horse.”_ She had a pair of canvas bags sewn together by the handles thrown over her back. She lifted a manila folder out. “Look, I have some basic ideas of what sort of equipment I’ll need, if you’d look at these first--”

Glenn Chambers gave her a condescending smile. He plucked the folder out of the air and set it down, unopened, on the desk. “Ladybird, I obviously need to explain some things to you,” he said with a smile. “When you signed on with the PRT, you did, in fact, agree to go with whatever “image” we devised for you.”

“What??”

“It’s right there in your contract in black and white,” he said smugly. “Part of the standard contract. Your likeness, image, and even your Cape name are all property of the PRT now. If you refuse to abide by the choices we make for it, we-- that is, the PRT, ahem-- can level considerable penalties against you for breach of contract.”

“But that’s not fair!” Taylor protested.

“One must learn to carefully read what one signs,” he chided, waving a finger under her appalled nose. “Now, please, Miss Hebert-- do stop being truculent and look over these images.” He pushed the mouse around to where she could reach it.

She slouched in her seat. After a few seconds of apparent pouting, she gripped the mouse in her aura and began clicking through the wardrobe images again. Finally she deigned to comment. “Well, okay, one thing I do have to point out...” she paused.

“Yes? Do go on, feedback is important.” He smiled indulgently at her.

“These really don’t express anything about the theme of my powers,” she said.

“Ah, theme?”

“Oh yes. Now, while I can do a great number of things with my energy aura-- telekinesis, blasting, forcefields, even some limited transmogrification… well, it might have something to do with my trigger event but they work best when what I’m doing something that has to do with…. Bugs.”

“Bugs,” he said, talking through a mouthful of breakfast sandwich.

“Yes, Bugs,” she said with a smile. Then she pointed with her hoof. “Like that one crawling out of your Mister Muffin.”

Glenn looked down to see a pair of long black antennae sticking out of his sandwich, waving at him. He dropped the sandwich like it had caught fire and screamed.

Ladybird didn’t turn a hair. She plucked the bug, a rather sizeable roach, out of the eggy mess and dropped it-- right back on top of the bun. Glenn let out a little distressed squeal. “It’s really neat, actually. I can make illusions of them, forcefields shaped like them, I can even control them--” the roach skittered in a circle, then a figure eight. Glenn let out another squeal.

“I can multiply them, even!” Taylor’s horn sparkled, and the desk was suddenly swarming with dozens of bugs. Glenn rose to his feet with a shriek. “They don’t last long though,” she went on and all but one-- still perched on his tie-- vanished. He sighed with relief.

“I can even make them bigger!” – and the inch-long roach on his tie was suddenly a foot long and staring him in the eye.

His scream this time was spectacular.

“Oh calm down, it won’t hurt you,” Ladybird scoffed. She shrank it back to normal. “There, better?”

Glenn fell back in his chair, jowls shaking and eyes wide and round for once. He did NOT take his eyes off the roach perched on his tie like the world’s ugliest tie-tack.

“I can even turn them into other KINDS of bugs!” Ladybird said. “Any requests?” Her horn was already lighting up.

“Butterflies! Butterflies!” Glenn whimpered, his voice piercingly high.

“Okay!” With a flash, the roach transformed into a butterfly. One with a five-foot wingspan, and its sticklike legs clamped to his shirt. Glenn Chambers learned that no matter how pretty butterfly WINGS are, their FACES are anything but pretty. It licked his face with its proboscis.

Sound baffling be damned, they heard his unholy scream two floors in either direction.

The butterfly transformed again… this time to a tiny moth the size of his thumbnail. It fluttered away, leaving him laid back in his office chair, pale grey and sweating and clutching his chair arms and contemplating the new moistness in his shorts. “You know, Mr. Chambers, I don’t think I’m going to be using any of these,” Ladybird said thoughtfully, her forehoof raised to her chin. “In fact I’d rather go naked than wear this garbage.

“Come to think of it--” she bent her chin down, grabbed her shawl in her teeth, and shook her head till it came off her back. With a flip of her head she tossed it in the corner. “It really was getting ridiculous,” she said, shaking out her mane and tail. She fished around telekinetically in one of her bags and pulled out her cell phone. “Lessee… dial, dial…. Oh, voicemail, oh well. HI Daddy! The discussion with Mister Chambers went great. And guess what, I’m a NUDIST now, Yaaaay! Buh bye!”

She put the phone away and pronked up onto Glenn’s desk. “Now, let’s take it from the top, Mr. Glenn Chambers, head of the PRT Image Department,” she said. “This whole meeting was a test."

"A test?" he croaked.

"Yes. To see if you'd actually try to pull _this exact stunt_ with me. Congratulations, you FAILED. Your advice is crap, I’m not following it. I’m not wearing any of those ridiculous frou frou silly ass outfits. I’ll be wearing the gear I submitted in that folder,” she tapped it with a hoof, “that _my father and I_ vetted first. And if you try to hassle me on the issue, I’ll have YOU brought up for breach of contract.”

He attempted to rally. “The-- the standard contract--”

She gave him a smile. “I didn’t SIGN a standard contract,” she said. “In exchange for my family not SUING THE PANTS off the PRT for what one of the Wards did to me, I got to dictate a LOT of the terms of my contract. My father took a copy home and went over it with a fine-toothed comb. You remember my dad? The guy who all but runs the Dockworkers’ Union? Taking apart crooked contracts is his bread and butter. After he found some of those cute little clauses your lawyers put in, he went and consulted with a lawyer, Carol Dallon. You know, Brandish? Member of New Wave? Well, she took one look and after she quit _laughing,_ she wrote up a NEW contract, with a LOT more protections for myself, including legal rights to my my likeness, my persona, my name, et cetera.

And THAT, Mister Glenn Chambers, Image _Consultant,_ is the contract that Emily Piggot, my father, and I all signed.

“You know what?” She took her folder back and stowed it away. “I think I’ll pick someone else to _consult_ about my gear and appearance. Your track record… stinks.” With that, she hopped off the desk and sauntered out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

 

* * *

 

 

“And Piggot let you get away with it?” Aegis gawked in disbelief.

“Piggot was the one who promised not to warn hiiiim,” Ladybird singsonged, pronking around the floor a bit. Emily Piggot may have had a lot of issues, and been less than fond of capes in general-- but you didn’t have to love your coworkers to hate the PR department with a passion. Even as pissed as she'd been about getting armtwisted into the new contract, Piggot had unleashed the impenitent pony on the much hated head of PR with an unholy level of glee.

“You are my hero and I want to be you when I grow up,” Clockblocker gasped, collapsed on the couch from lack of air. He’d been laughing for nearly three minutes straight.

“Oh, I think I should be the one to inform you… Mrs. Dallon’s law firm is offering their services, on percentage, to the rest of the Wards to renegotiate their contracts. Dad says Mrs. Dallon took one look at the provisions in your contracts and was fit to be TIED. She started listing off child labor laws, intellectual property rights, and then she REALLY started going...”

“On percentage?” Gallant asked.

“Well, either of the lump settlement for past salaries and lost income, or a percentage of future merchandising,” she said. “She figures a rather hefty chunk of the revenue for all those Wards figurines and t-shirts and what all is rightfully yours. Some of you who are close to leaving might want the lump sum, while someone like Vista would want the percentage of future sales.” she kicked up her hoof. “In my case, I’m going to be getting a little bit of cash every time they sell a cute little purple plastic pony in the gift shoppe, from now in perpetuity...”

Any watcher could have seen the wheels turning as the Wards each started calculating just how many t-shirts with their likenesses had flown off the shelf since they’d signed on. “Holy cow, that’s a lotta Quatloos,” Kid Win muttered.

Taylor shook her head. It had been horrifying when her father had pointed it out. They were paid a pittance of an allowance, and another pittance stocked away in a trust fund that wouldn’t have amounted to one percent of the profit the PRT would have made off them. They had been tricked into signing away all their intellectual property rights too-- Kid Win’s inventions, for example, but even their NAMES weren’t their own.

If the Wards had just been childhood celebrities, it would have been a scandal…. But, all fluff to the contrary, the Wards weren’t just celebrities, they were _child soldiers,_ and they were being paid less than burger flippers while making the PRT more money than some rock stars _._ The PRT was all but guaranteed to fold like wet toast on the issue: being revealed as bilking teenagers who helped fight Endbringers would have been a lethal blow to their reputation.

Too bad Mr. Image Consultant hadn’t clued the PRT in to _that_ little PR social faux pas.

“Do you think she can get me a costume that’s a little more...” Vista said hopefully, picking at the hem of her skirt. “I mean a little more mature? Skirts are so-- _eighteen nineties._ ”

“Well, she should fix it so you can talk and they’ll listen, which is the same thing sort’ve,” Ladybird said. “Oh, that reminds me… Kid Win? Could I ask a really big favor?” she asked, a little timidly.

Kid Win beamed. “Heck, even if the lawyer thing doesn’t pan out, we all owe you just for making Glenn Chambers swallow his own tongue.”

“If only we coulda seen it,” Browbeat grumbled.

“Guys...” Gallant sounded pained. Even Vista couldn’t help rolling her eyes. Gallant could be SO noble and SUCH a pain in the butt.

“Actually...” Ladybird said. She shook out her mane; a tiny digital camera fell out. “It’s amazing where you can hide a GoPro these days,” she said smugly.

“DIBS!” Clockblocker yelped, grabbing the camera and running for the breakroom. “This MUST go up on the main TV screen...”

“I’m on the popcorn!” Browbeat said, heading for the kitchenette.

“Chips for me, I hate the little hulls,” Vista shouted after him.

Kid Win grinned. “Okay, what’d you need, Ladybird?” The little unicorn floated the folder over to him. He opened it and flipped through it, eyebrows rising. “Hey, well thought out stuff here,” he said. “Simple too. I can put it all together for you before tonight.”

“Really?” Ladybird beamed. “Great!”

“But first… time for America’s Funniest Superhero Videos,” he chuckled, heading for the breakroom.

The video footage was even better than the story. Even Gallant was howling with laughter five minutes in.

 

* * *

 

 

“Okay, let’s see what you guys came up with,” Vista. “Ladybird, come on out!”

Ladybird trotted out of Kid Win’s workshop. The other Wards made sounds of approval. “Looks very slick, very utilitarian,” Gallant said. “With a little touch of futuristic.”

Clockblocker pinched his fingers together, italian style. “Ahh, but also a certain arteestic je ne se qua...” Vista dope-slapped him. From across the room. “Ow.”

As a costume as such, there wasn’t much to it. There was a wide wraparound visor large enough to protect her eyes but transparent enough that it did not conceal them, a body harness with two good-sized semirigid saddlebags, and slim white booties over her hooves. Everything was in pale blue or white, save for the Ladybird logos on the panniers. “Why the boots?” Aegis asked.

“Nailless horseshoes, actually. To protect my feet,” Ladybird said. She held one up. “Horse hooves aren’t solid all the way across; we have a sensitive area in the middle, the frog. It DOES get chilly stepping in cold water or mud.”

“Why not regular horseshoes?” Aegis persisted.

“What? No way!” She said. “Even if I wasn’t averse to NAILING THINGS TO MY BODY, I did some research. Horseshoes like that are actually BAD for horses’ hooves and legs. Restricts circulation, among other things. And the nail holes open the hoof to infection, and...”

“But people have been shoeing horses for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Aegis said.

Kid Win snorted. “Yeah, and it’s not like humans have _ever_ done something _stupid_ for centuries on end,” he said.

“.,.Point. Okay, moving on; the rest of it?”

“The visor is a full heads-up display,” Kid Win said. “I based it off of one of Armsmaster’s old ones. Virtual screen and keyboard, she has an onboard computer in one of the saddlebags-- this one’s scavenged from a laptop but I can put in something more powerful later…. It has Wifi of course. It also hooks up to her cellphone and to our comm system. The inside is actually a touch screen with a virtual keyboard and mouse-- turns out she can manipulate touchscreens with her TK.”

Ladybird already had the computer up and was flipping through some online pages. “Wouldn’t be able to use my cellphone if I couldn’t. Hooves don’t work so great on them.”

“And the saddlebags?”

“Stuff I might need in the field,” Taylor said, flipping the bags open and levitating a few items out. “First aid stuff… plastic cuffs… extra thumb drives and stuff for my computer…”

“A police baton?” Aegis said, reaching into one bag and pulling out a collapsible baton.

“I might need it, you never know,” Ladybird said straightfaced, and deliberately NOT looking at Vista.

“a taser? Long-range foaming mace? Brass knuckles?” Aegis went on.

“Very utilitarian, those things,” Ladybird said. “Who knows when I might need them.”

“Or somebody you’re very likely to be partnered with?” Gallant said in amusement, looking over at Vista.

Ladybird frowned. “Yeah, yeah. I do NOT like that Vista’s basically ordered to go out completely unarmed. There’s more than one villain out there who can get around her space-stretching power, and plenty of thugs who just might get lucky, catch her off guard and close distance with her. Bitch at me all you like, I’m keeping this stuff for HER.”

Aegis sighed. “Our supervisors---”

“Can’t say diddly so long as it’s MY equipment, right?” Ladybird insisted. “And hey, it’s my business if I loan it out to some teammate or other in the field for a minute or two...”

“She shouldn’t NEED any of this--”

“And houses shouldn’t need fire extinguishers, either,” Ladybird said stubbornly.

Aegis sighed and held up his hands in defeat. “ I get it, I get it,” he said. “’What melee weapons?’ This is gonna turn around and bite me in the butt, I know it. ” He sighed and dropped the stuff back in Ladybird’s saddlebag, shaking his head. The others could see a wry half-smile on his face though. Ladybird wasn’t the onlyone uncomfortable with an unarmed Ward.

Of course not everyone was comfortable with an armed Vista. She could be seen trying the brass knuckles on and giving a nervous looking Clockblocker a speculative eye.

“So, you ready to go out and make a splash on the scene?” Gallant asked.

Taylor took a deep breath, then let it out. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said.

 


	5. Chapter 5

“Oh who’s a special widdle baby? Oh yes, you is! Iddn’t oo sweet?” Ladybird cooed and nuzzled at the baby in the stroller. The pudgy-cheeked infant crowed and kicked its bootied feet in glee.

Her mother laughed. “You do have a way with children, Ladybird,” she said.

“Looking like a living plush toy helps,” Ladybird chuckled. “Oop, and she’s got my visor,” she said as a chubby fist gripped her headband. “Oh nooo, I shall be unmasked and the whole world will know my secret identityyy, what shall I doooo...”

The laughing mother helped pry Ladybird’s visor and no few locks of mane out of her baby’s grasp. “You two have a nice day,” she said to Ladybird and Vista. The two nodded and waved and walked on.

“You do that with every baby or little kid you see,” Vista teased.

“Best part of the job so far,” Ladybird said cheerfully. “If we’re gonna be the P.R. division, we might as well enjoy it. Besides,” she said slyly, “I don’t see you turning down those free ice cream cones the pushcart vendors give us whenever we do this patrol.”

“Darn right. I’m going to utterly exploit your marketable cuteness for all it’s worth,” Vista said, rubbing her hands together. “Mwahahaha.”

The two were on their regular Saturday foot patrol, tooling about through one of the more upscale neighborhoods in Brockton Bay. The confluence of circumstances that led to that arrangement gave Taylor a headache to think about. The PRT had (predictably) decided that they needed to play up the Public Relations angle of their cute, cuddly newest member as much as possible. This had (also predictably) led to Ladybird being teamed with Vista, the other “small and cute” member of the Wards, as much as possible. It also led to their patrols mysteriously all taking place in the ‘gated community’ end of the city, where the rich and yupwardly mobile all resided… much to Vista’s disgruntlement.

“You know this is obviously payback for us getting the PR hacks over a legal barrel,” Vista said as they ambled through the park. She smirked. “And for making Glenn Chambers have to change his pants.”

“No doubt,” Ladybird said sheepishly. “Sorry about that… I guess I did go a little overboard.”

Vista shrugged. “Not really your fault,” she said. “Glenn Chambers is hardly the only dork working in the PRT.” She looked down at herself. “At least I got a new costume out of it.” The cute-little-girl skirt was gone, replaced with a padded and armored full body suit and a proper utility belt. Her visor was now a full helmet, protecting her ears and the top of her head while letting her ponytail hang down the back. “I can live with a little punishment detail for that, at least.”

“Looks good on you,” Ladybird said. “And about this being ‘punishment detail--’” She stopped and tapped her chin with one hoof. “Iiiiii’m not so sure.”

Vista rolled her eyes. “They got us on a ‘kiddy patrol,’ Ladybird,” she said. “Glenn Chambers is trying to rub it in our faces how they’re never going to let us do anything USEFUL.”

“He’d LIKE to rub that in, yeah,” Ladybird agreed. “But I think Armsmaster and Miss Militia are just letting him _think_ he got what he wants.”

“How do you figure that?” Vista said, puzzled.

“Well, if Armsmaster or Miss Militia or Aegis or Piggot were actually punishing us for upsetting Glenn Chambers, they would have us doing nothing but running the comms and doing public appearances or kludging paperwork, junk like that,” Ladybird pointed out. “Instead we got the gear we wanted, the costumes we wanted, we’re out doing patrols without the ‘big kids’ playing babysitter on us--”

Vista grudgingly nodded. That had been one of her pet peeves. She had been on the team longer than anyone; she had more training and experience than any two of the current wards combined. Yet even on patrols she was expected to tag along with two other “more mature” wards “due to regulations” (aka “you’re a little girl and can’t take care of yourself.”) “Only because you’re nearly old enough to drive,” she pointed out. “You’re still expected to be my babysitter--”

“And you’re kind of expected to be mine. Actually, we’d probably end up partnered anyway, the PR divisions’ “team kid and pet” obsession or not,” Ladybird brooded. “You’re the youngest member and I’m the least experienced-- but at the same time, you’re the _most_ experienced, I’m the most versatile--” it was too true; Ladybird’s powers seemed to have more utility every time she was tested. The power testing wonks were joking that she had so many different power ratings she just needed one more to win a free toaster. “--And maybe you didn’t notice but we’re also the two most powerful Capes on the Wards.

“We’re also already crazy popular, if PHO is anything to go by, we’re non-threatening but we have enough power between us to take care of ourselves….and we’re here in the fancy neighborhoods, making good with the rich and famous of Brockton Bay.” She gave Vista’s leg a comradely hip bump. “They made that big baby Glenn think he got his way, but Armsmaster and Miss Militia set things up so we got the perfect team-up.”

“Well yeah, that is one way of looking at it, I guess,” Vista said reluctantly.

“Trust me,” Ladybird said as confidently as she could. “We’re just getting our feet... er, hooves… wet on these little cake patrols. Sooner or later though we’ll show ‘em what we’ve got, and we’ll really wow ‘em.” Ladybird hoped she sounded more certain of that than she felt. The law in the form of Carol Dallon and the PRT regulations might be on her side, but one thing she’d learned from her long painful experience at Winslow was that people who had it in for you might not obey the rules themselves but they certainly knew how to use them against you. She’d maybe gone a liiiiiittle overboard with Glenn, and she should’ve remembered that walking ego-trips like that could be incredibly petulant.

Glenn might be doing his level best to sabotage them from behind the scenes, but there was no need for her to let her cynicism rub off on the younger Ward.

Of course Vista was enough of a Protectorate veteran that she had more than enough cynicism all her own. “We’re hardly going to wow anyone tooling around the one-percenter neighborhoods,” she grumbled.

There was a scream.

Taylor’s ears pricked up. “Did you hear that??” she said, alarmed.

Vista was immediately alert. “What?” She scanned in the opposite direction Taylor was looking.

Taylor kept looking, her hypersensitive ears swiveling. “I heard someone scream! A little girl, from the sound of it--”

The park had simple, single-lane streets on three sides and a two-lane on the fourth. She turned just in time to see an unmarked black van turning onto the two-lane. Then she heard the scream again, it was coming from the van, she knew it! “It’s a kidnapping!” she yelled. “Black van, nine o’clock!” She took off in a gallop. “Bring up Comms--”

“ _This is Comm_ _s_ _,”_ Triumph’s voice said in her ear. The voice command option for her stuff was on the job. _“What’s up, Ladybird?”_

“We’ve got a possible kidnapping, black van--” a tilt of her head and she got a zoom-in view on her HUD. “Obscured license plate. Heading North on Greenview two-lane, we’re in pursooOOOPP!” In the excitement she’d forgotten the talents of the girl running along beside her. With a gesture Vista had shrunk the distance to the intersection and to the van. But the driver was already accelerating--

 

* * *

 

 

When the van had pulled over in front of her as she walked home from school, Dinah Alcott knew this was it.

All precognitive capes got, as part of their power, a unique list of predictions and forecasts, usually ones exclusive to or particularly about themselves. They were rarely happy predictions.

Almost from the day she had Triggered as a precog, Dinah Alcott had been saddled with a veritable card catalog of horrible predictions. The length of time till the next Endbringer attack (It was impossible to get a precog fix directly on the terrible monsters, but if you got a prediction that the city you lived in was going to be smashed into ruin sometime in the near future, it wasn’t too hard to connect the dots yourself.) The deaths of countless people she knew.

Her kidnapping.

The only thing that made it bearable was that her forecasts came in the form of _statistics._ Probabilities, from almost zero percent to almost one hundred percent. Nothing was set in stone; little things could change the possible outcome. She’d seen it happen several times. She could even figure out what those little things _were,_ if she asked her Power just the right question.

That was the hard part. When the van pulled to a halt right next to her and the men dressed all in black and wearing ski masks got out, she was too terrified to ask her power how to save herself. They moved in a brisk, no-nonsense fashion like they were businessmen on their way to work, not thugs about to kidnap a nine year old girl. She clutched her bookbag to her chest and stumbled back.

The one closest to her actually stopped for a second. “Don’t try anything stupid, kid,” he said as the other two grabbed her by the arms. “What’re the odds anyone’s gonna hear ya?”

_He said the magic words._

Dinah blinked, her heart surging with hope. The moment he asked the question, her power activated and gave her the answer. _Ninety-eight percent,_ her power said. She didn’t hesitate, screaming at the top of her lungs.

The three men didn’t even pause. The van doors opened and she was shoved inside, rapidly restrained with plastic straps around her wrists and ankles. The doors slammed shut and the van took off. “Hey, slow it down up there!” the lead guy shouted. “We go roaring off we’ll attract all sorts of attention!”

Dinah forced herself to ignore the mumbled oaths, the smell of sweat and too many bodies crammed in too small a vehicle and the sight of large dangerous looking guns everywhere, and began frantically asking her Power the one question that she could think of:

_If I scream now, what are the chances someone who can save me will hear?_

_15%_

_If I scream now, what are the chances?_

_25%_

_How about now?_

_45%_

_How about now?_

_78%_

_How about now?_

_75%_

The odds were dropping again! Any second now they were going to gag her, or they would be out of range... She leaned towards the back doors as far as she could, hoping that the blacked-out glass would mean more sound got out that way, and shrieked her lungs out.

It was the last sound she would be allowed to make. The men swore as the sound pierced their eardrums; rough hands grabbed her and slapped tape over her mouth, silencing her. She was shoved back into her seat. From her angle she could just see out the front windshield between the two front seats.

_Chances that someone who could save me heard that?_

 

Suddenly the tree-lined boulevard down which they were traveling stretched out, as if they were driving straight into an impossibly long dolly zoom. The driver swore like mad as the traffic sign a block away suddenly retreated by almost a mile. “Cape! It’s gotta be a Cape!”

 

Dinah’s power gave her the answer at the exact same moment.

 

_100%_

 

* * *

 

 

Vista fell to her knees, her kneepads crunching in the sidewalk gravel. Both her hands were outstretched as she simultaneously shrank the distance to the back of the van and elongated the space ahead of it with everything she had. For a brief moment the getaway van actually seemed to be going _backwards_. But the driver stomped on the gas and the van began… slowly, at first… to pull away. _“Get ‘em!”_ she said, her teeth gritting.

Ladybird ran flat out in a full gallop. The van’s rear bumper was mere feet from her, but it was slowly pulling away as the driver gunned the motor for all it was worth. Maybe she could summon a cloud of butterflies to block the windshield-- but wouldn’t the Manton effect interfere with Vista’s space-warping??

The van suddenly surged ahead. Either Vista had reached the limits of her endurance or the van had reached the edge of her warp-zone. In moments the van was nearly a hundred yards down the road. Ladybird let out a little cry of despair-- but in a twinkling that despair flipped into outrage. Just the taste of that old emotion she’d been tormented with so long was enough to light her anger. These pukes kidnapped a little kid! They were probably LAUGHING while the little kid cried! They were GLOATING about how they got away from the Wards, she knew it!

Power crackled through her, making her horn light up bright as a road flare. She didn’t know what she was going to do to those kidnappers but by golly she was gonna DO it!

There was a brilliant flash of lavender-white… _everywhere._ When the flash cleared away she was no longer running down a boulevard in pursuit of a black van. She was lying on her back in the floor of what had to be the interior of that selfsame van, surrounded by one tied-up, frightened looking little girl and three astonished looking gun-wielding men in black suits and ski masks.

Holy craptarts.

Well, time for reflection later. First things first. She looked up at the nearest of the three and gave him a smirk. “Hello, _buttmunch_ ,” she said-- and kicked him with all her might with both back hooves right in the crotch.

 

* * *

 

Vista strained as hard as she could, but she finally had to give up. She’d had to have stretched that few feet of road ahead of the van by like, _a mile,_ but she couldn’t keep it up. The van roared off. In moments it would reach a major intersection and disappear into the mess of Brockton Bay traffic…

There was a brilliant flash of lavender light. When Vista blinked the spots out of her eyes, Ladybird had vanished.

Then the van started swerving. Then something, four yellowish somethings zipped out of nowhere and all four tires blew. The van actually hopped into the air several feet before landing and coming to a skidding halt.

The crowd of people waiting at the crosswalk backed up hastily as the van began to rock violently. They started _running_ when several bulletholes appeared in the roof. Vista, her breath caught, quickly warp-hopped down the street to the fracas, careful to take cover behind a lightpost.

Several large, disturbingly human-sized dents bulged out in the roof and sides; the windshield and windows shattered, scattering bits of tinted glass all over the intersection.

Finally the doors burst open and several men dressed in black tumbled out onto the pavement. They were screaming and flailing about, weapons strapped over their shoulders forgotten as they tried to flee the bumblebees that were attacking them.

Vista blinked. Yes, bumblebees. She had to blink again, and cringe more than a bit, as she realized that the reason she could identify them despite being over thirty feet away was because the fat bumbly bugs were each the size of tennis balls.

The next thing to appear in the back door of the van was a tiny, lavender ball of rage. “You use MACHINE GUNS to kidnap a little girl? YOU COWARDS! COME BACK HERE!” Ladybird shouted. Everyone present watched in astonishment as the cutest little unicorn in Brockton Bay seized the nearest of the fleeing kidnappers (who had made the unfortunate mistake of going for his gun) in her telekinesis and began slamming him quite firmly against the asphalt. _“I’ll… teach… YOU… to kidnap… little girls… in...MY… town...”_ The machine gun went to pieces, and it looked like the kidnapper was in danger of doing the same.

The bumblebees were beginning to disperse, disappearing like popping soap bubbles in little bursts of light. The other, somewhat lumpy kidnappers were apparently willing to work through the pain; they started getting to their feet and grappling for their weapons. It was hard to tell the way their faces were swollen but Vista could guess they were glaring pure hate and death at Ladybird.

Vista quickly rubberbanded space and stepped up to the first goon. She tapped him on the shoulder with the collapsible baton she’d grabbed from Ladybird’s saddlebag. He was still on one knee; he whipped his head around, startled. “Hello,” Vista said-- and cracked him across the base of his neck with her baton. He dropped like a sack of laundry.

She quickly rubberbanded her way around the crime scene, dropping two more. The third though was a touch faster on the uptake; he had his uzi up and ready when Vista snapped over to him.

Fortunately Ladybird wasn’t as singleminded as she seemed. The last mook made a grab for Vista, threatening with his gun and obviously intent on taking a hostage-- but the moment he did he was cast in shadow. He looked up in time to see an enormous butterfly shaped out of the van doors hovering over him just before it slammed him between its wings with a tremendous bang. He slumped to the ground, thoroughly unconscious and rather deformed from original factory standards.

Vista quickly warp stepped her way from kidnapper to kidnapper, zip tying them and relieving them of all their weapons. Soon they had a pile of guns, knives and other implements of harm on one side of the ruptured van, and a pile of hogtied would-be kidnappers on the other. Vista was rattling off info via the commlink to a flabbergasted Triumph, while Ladybird untied the girl and was helping her down out of the van. “Are you okay, sweetie?” Ladybird asked her gently, letting the girl lean her shaky weight on Taylor’s withers. “What’s your name?”

“Dinah Alcott,” the girl said, her voice trembling only a little.

“The girl says her name is Dinah Alcott--” Vista relayed to Triumph. She then winced and clutched at her earpiece; it was a bad idea to startle a voice-blaster. A great deal of loud sounds were coming through her commlink. “What do you--” she throttled herself. “What do you mean ‘your cousin?’” she whispered, covering her mouth with one glove. She dropped the pretense of a whisper at the next round of comm-chatter. _“THE MAYOR’S NIECE??”_ she squawked.

Ladybird heard that much. “What?” She looked at Dinah. “You’re the Mayor’s niece?” Dinah nodded. Ladybird looked at Vista in confusion. “Who could possibly have a reason for kidnapping the Mayor’s niece?” The Mayor was only moderately well to do; there were plenty of other people in Brockton Bay with more money. And as an attempt to extort anything out of the city, kidnapping the Mayor's niece was a really lousy plan-- Brockton Bay was perpetually broke.

But apparently Dinah’s power thought that the lavender unicorn had asked the question in the right way. “15% chance currently of the E88 taking interest in kidnapping me,” she said.

“22% chance of the Teeth or the S9.

“35% chance of Skidmark and the Merchants.

“43% chance of the ABB deciding to kidnap me.

“78% chance of the YangBan deciding they want to kidnap me.

“95.3% chance of the parties involved THIS time working for Coil, with a 50% probability he will make another attempt later.

 

“And the reason why, it’s because… because I’m a Cape. A Precog.” Her chin crumpled and tears began rolling down her cheeks. _“And the numbers keep going up..”_ the girl broke down. Bawling, she flung her arms around Ladybird’s neck and sobbed her heart out as the police sirens swelled in the distance.

 

* * *

 

 

Then the police and the PRT arrived and it was noise, noise, noise. There were sirens everywhere. There was a great deal of yelling and shouting as the six would-be kidnappers were stuffed into various squad cars. Then they found out that the kidnappers were in the employ of a known supervillain-- Coil-- and had furthermore been attempting to kidnap a new Trigger right out of her neighborhood, and then the BBPD and the PRT were arguing over who had custody of them due to that. So Vista and Ladybird ended up giving their statements twice, once for each group, and passing out USB sticks of their helmet-cam footage like candy.

The girls’ parents had shown up and there had been a tremendous fuss. Then they had been informed that their little girl was actually a Cape and a Precog, and the fuss had REALLY taken off. Powers testing appointments nothing; little Dinah Alcott was going straight to the safety of the Wards and the protection of some of the best security forces on Earth.

In the middle of all this, Vista and Ladybird found out that the rest of the Wards had been tangled up in a bank robbery, of all things, by the Undersiders-- and apparently it had gone completely FUBAR. The bank was half-wrecked, a few tens of thousands of dollars were scattered in the streets, several of the Wards had been pretty roughed up, and somehow Glory Girl and Panacea had been in the middle of it and there was something about an entire dairy truck of cottage cheese…

Vista and Ladybird stood next to each other on the roof of the devastated van. (To the PRT’s and the BBPD’s bemusement, Ladybird had claimed the thing as legal Cape salvage, and she was now waiting for her father to show up with the tow-truck company.) It was still an hour going and it didn’t look like anything was calming down; the TV vans had shown up and were sticking microphones in everyone’s faces, rubberneckers of all stripe were crowding the street corners and slowing traffic to a crawl…

Vista looked over at Ladybird. The unicorn girl was all but vibrating with excitement. “What’s wrong with you?” Vista asked.

“Me? What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you excited?” Ladybird said. “We did it!” At Vista’s uncomprehending stare, Ladybird rolled her eyes. “Oh come ON, what were we talking about just a while ago? Showing our stuff, proving our chops, however they put it-- and we just did it. We did it!

“We-- not Armsmaster, not Miss Militia, not the Protectorate, not the other Wards-- us! You and me! WE stopped them from kidnapping the Mayor’s niece! We stopped the Bad Guys, we rescued the kid from the kidnappers… us! All on our own! We proved we can be heroes, and the whole world saw it!” She started dancing in a circle, hooves prancing as she spun around. “We did it, we did it, we said that we would do it, and indeed we did--” she sang.

Vista laughed at the looney unicorn. “I guess we did, didn’t we?”

“Yeah! Victory dance! _Uh huh, sisters are doin’ it for themselves--_ ” Ladybird shook a tailfeather, Vista finally joining in and doing the Running Man next to her. Laughing like loons the two stood atop the half-destroyed van and boogied down.

It was all over Youtube within half an hour.

 

* * *

 

 

Coil sat in his vault-like lair and seethed as he watched the newsfeeds. Fool, fool, impatient fool! The plan had been perfect, would have been perfect. And with his powers, more importantly it would have been _re-usable._

That was one of the greatest advantages of his time-splitting power, he’d realized over the years. By splitting time into two paths, Schroedinger’s-Cat style, then executing a plan in one timeline while nixing it in the other, he could not only erase failed endeavours but preserve the plan for a retry later. It was invaluable when you had a perfect plan that only flubbed due to one error at the last moment-- most villains would simply have to ash-can the plan and start over from scratch, never daring to use the same plan ever again. But if a plan failed due to some tiny chance mistake, he, Coil, could erase it, salvage it and try it over again.

But only if he saw them through to the end. If he mistook a success for a failure, or worse a failure for a success, then not only was he stuck with the mistake but an otherwise pristine plan would have to go into the circular file for good. Usually he would take out his rage at the failure on whoever was responsible… sometimes several times, shooting, stabbing, or strangling them over and over again till his mood improved.

This time however he was thwarted in seeking out catharsis in his typical way, because the fault was entirely his own. A quick peek at PRT files had shown that the Protectorate was busy elsewhere in the State today. A word to the Undersiders had them going out to rob one of the city’s banks, tying up the police, the PRT and the Wards.

Then he had given the go sign to the mercenaries he’d employed for the kidnapping.

Finding the Alcott girl in the first place had been a stroke of luck. He’d been attending one of the countless soirees that seemed to come with politicking, no matter the scale, and the Mayor’s extended family had been in attendance, including his rather precocious niece. A few words of idle conversation with her parents and herself and he had recognized the signs of a precog-- the odd phrasing she used when replying to a question when she wasn’t paying attention, the description of her ongoing problems with headaches…. He’d actually split the timeline, cornered her in a back room and squeezed her for several questions, confirming his suspicions before letting the timeline collapse. He later confirmed her predictions at his leisure-- to his shock she had been stunningly accurate.

Since that day he’d plotted out her kidnapping with methodical care.

But when the opportunity came, he blew it. Irretrievably. He’d given the go-ahead to the mercenaries. The leader of the group had called him back, confirming the capture as calmly as a man describing a boring day of fishing. In a foolish moment of optimism, Coil had collapsed the timeline presuming victory-- and not ten seconds after, it had all gone South.

Not ten seconds after he had collapsed the other timeline, permanently committing himself to the outcome in this one, two wards… two wards who weren’t even supposed to be on patrol alone!… Caught the team of grossly overpaid professional mercenaries and thrashed the living hide off them. Now a team of his mercenaries were in PRT custody ripe and ready to be interrogated, and the girl was now a Ward and working for the PRT-- instead of for him as she ought to be.

No matter how he wished it otherwise, it was luck. Pure dumb luck. That, and his own over confidence. From here on out he would know better than to count his chickens before they were hatched.

He regarded the video clips of the two Wards who had handed him this defeat. He considered the preliminary reports and the rather tattered state of both the vehicle and the men being hauled away. People had obviously been seriously underestimating these two. Perhaps keeping a closer eye on these two-- especially this “Ladybird”-- would be a wise idea.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

“This is hilarious, adorable and disturbing,” Clockblocker said, chin in his hand. “I can’t make up my mind which is the most.”

The subject of his attention looked over her Fugly burger at him and burped cutely.

“Charming.”

“So I’m told,” Ladybird said. “And what do you mean ‘disturbing?’”

“You’re supposed to be an herbivore, and you’re eating cow meat,” Clockblocker said. “Don’t you find that off-putting in the least?”

“Depends on the mythology you subscribe to, you know,” Ladybird pointed out. “There’s a lot of fantasy franchises out there that feature carnivorous unicorns.”

“The Bad Unicorn series is supposed to be satire!” Clockblocker objected.

The end of the month had come up and the Wards’ patrol schedule had undergone its mandatory change-up. Armsmaster felt it was best to familiarize the Wards with as much of the city as possible and with one another; Miss Militia considered it a safety measure, preventing the Wards from falling into predictable patterns that criminals might exploit.

Though she was sorry her time as Vista’s partner was being halted for now, Taylor regarded the reasons for the patrol change as only sensible. Of course she was a little less sanguine about her new partner being Clockblocker. Beyond wondering how their powers and abilities would work together, she was uncertain how well her personality and that of the team prankster and troublemaker would mesh. Her past at Winslow High had made her a little skittish about people with a joking frame of mind-- and what they might consider “funny.”

So far, so good though. He did have an oddball sense of humor… but he also seemed to have enough sense to stay away from certain topics, and to refrain from pulling any pranks on the newest Ward. Well, second newest.

“So how do you figure Vista’s doing with the new recruit?” Clockblocker asked before taking a bite out of his own burger. His faceless visor was up so he could eat, but he wore a sheer black cowl underneath it to hide his identity.

There’d been a lot of positive fallout from the kidnap rescue. Protectorate P.R. indexes were at an all time high, with an especial load of positivity about both Vista and Ladybird. (the footage of their impromptu victory dance atop the wrecked van was a worldwide hit on Youtube, and there were topic threads all over PHO about them.) And it would seem that the higher ups were loosening up about what both Vista and Ladybird were qualified to handle; Ladybird was now patrolling with Clockblocker in the downtown area, and Vista was essentially getting an informal ‘sideways promotion’--- they had actually managed to sell her on the idea of being an unofficial, in-team coach for the newest members of the Wards. She had taken to the role like a duck to water. Maybe in the end, Taylor mused, just the simple gesture of respect was all Vista really needed.

Which brought everything to the topic at hand. “Well, she’s sort of off the patrol roster this month, but I think Vista’s getting into being a ‘mentor’,” Ladybird said, dunking a few fries in burger sauce and noshing. “And it doesn’t hurt that Eight Ball is closer to her own age. Those two are getting thick as thieves.” Eight Ball being the newly inducted Dinah Alcott. The moment her parents had learned that Dinah was a Cape, they had pounced on the offer of a place in the Wards with both feet. That had put a smile on Director Piggot’s face, at least fleetingly.

Of course that smile had vanished rather quickly when Dinah’s parents had shown up with Carol Dallon in tow, briefcase armed and loaded.

Still, the PRT had come out way ahead. Good PR from a rescue, good relations with the Mayor’s office, and a brand new precog Thinker in the ranks.

“You would talk her into picking ‘Eight Ball’ as a name, though,” Ladybird added.

“It’s a good name,” Clockblocker grinned.

“You did it just so you could pick her up, shake her, look in her ear and yell ‘SIGNS POINT TO NO,’” Ladybird deadpanned. “She’s getting really sick of that, by the way...”

Clockblocker just cackled. Suddenly he stopped laughing. He looked over Ladybird’s shoulder and groaned. “Oh boy, it’s them again,” he said, sliding his visor down.

“Them? Them who?” Ladybird looked over her shoulder. What she saw out of Fugly Bob’s picture window soured her relative good mood almost instantly.

It went without saying that the revelation that the PRT had recruited a real, live unicorn into its ranks had been a huge hit nationwide. International, even. (Carol Dallon’s estimate of how much revenue Taylor’s image would bring to the PRT was short by almost an order of magnitude.) With that sudden and unexpected popularity however came an equally unexpected down side; not all her new “fans” were exactly well-balanced. Brockton Bay was about as far as you could get from the granola-crunchy shores of California. But the existence of a genuine, real live honest-to-gosh _mythical creature_ had resulted in the harbor city receiving a rapidly increasing influx of fruits, nuts and flakes. Everything from crazed fantasy fans to cryptozoologists to new-age mystics had flooded into the city, adding a truly unique tang-- or in the case of some, a noticeable pong-- to the tourist crowds.

Among the truly notable negatives among this crowd was one Madame Trelawney. She was a tall, stoop shouldered, gangly forty-something woman with a prominent sharp beak of a nose and a mane of long, frizzy hair that hung down past her waist. Her wardrobe looked like the salvage from a Sixties consignment shop. She wore thick, coke-bottle glasses, chunky bracelets and hoop earrings, and long loops of necklace strung from quartz crystal points, worry beads, dried seeds from some mystically significant rainforest tree and a mismatched mish-mash of religious and mystic pendants and talismans (considering the pedigree of most of the haphazard collection, Taylor could only marvel that one half of her jewelry collection hadn’t declared holy war on the other.) She had a tie-dye headband holding her mad lion’s mane of hair back out of her face, hemp sandals, and was otherwise dressed in a color-clashed mix of shawls, scarves and draping cloth. She claimed to be a seeress, a mystic, a shaman, a sage, and she had proclaimed herself to be Taylor Hebert, aka “Ladybird’s,” spirit guide.

The PRT had quickly determined that she had been subsisting for the past twenty years or so as the leader of a small new-age cult convent somewhere out in the California desert. Upon hearing a news bulletin of Ladybird’s debut, she had announced that the little purple unicorn was a “herald of a new Celestial Age,” and that she, Madame Trelawney, was chosen by the Spirit World “to guide the new ascendant in her apotheosis.” She and her faithful followers had loaded up their Volkswagon bus and driven cross-country to Brockton Bay….

Where, after making a spectacle of herself on one of the PRT tours, she was told in no uncertain terms that not only did Ladybird neither want nor need a “spirit guide,” but that the redoubtable Madame Trelawney would find herself thrown into prison if she attempted to approach Ladybird, her family or friends, the Wards, the PRT or the Protectorate against their wishes ever again (or as it was more pithily put, “If you ever come running up to us again, there better be an Endbringer on your ass.”) Lacking the funds to return to their convent-slash-squatter’s shack in the desert, they had set up housekeeping in the Docks someplace and now made a living selling new age trinkets, doing astral readings, and annoying the hell out of the natives.

It seemed at the moment that the Madame and her loyal flock were setting up a protest outside Fugly Bob’s. Among their numerous insufferable flaws, the Tambourine Heads were, you guessed it, Vegan. And being Californians, it wasn’t enough that they themselves were Vegan and practically subsisted on little more than nutritional smugness-- they must press and insist and coerce everyone else around them to join in their superior lifestyle, whether they wanted it or not.

“Whaddya think it’ll be this time, the guy in the chicken head or the naked chick with the butcher cuts labeled on her body?” Clockblocker said as they watched the Tambourine Heads warm up with a-- what else-- tambourine chorus line about the evils of meat. “I’m rooting for the naked chick, personally.”

Ladybird was too busy trying to hide behind a makeshift modesty screen made up of their menus. “Don’t know, don’t care,” she groused. “Please just don’t do anything to draw their attention this way.”

“Good luck with that, we were given window seats for a reason. Oh look, it’s Chicken Head,” Clockblocker continued. “Guess it’s too cold for naked butcher block chick. Oh well.” The chanting and tambourine whacking was getting rather loud.

“Should we do something?” Taylor said.

“I've just called the cops,” Clockblocker said, holding up his phone. “Hello, 911? This is Clockblocker, I'm at Fugly Bob's and Madame Trelawney's at it again. You might want to send a squad car... right, okay, gotcha.” He hung up.

“But--”

“We're Capes, not cops, Ladybird,” he said as he put up his phone. “Generally we're supposed to stick to catching robbers and fighting supervillains, and let the cops handle things like breaking up crowds for disturbing the peace. Unless they start committing an actual violent crime, or the Chicken Head guy starts shooting death-ray eggs out his butt at people, we're kind of sidelined.” He shrugged.

Taylor grumbled and glared out the window at the Tambourine Heads, stymied. She took a bite of her burger-- just as Madame Trelawney glanced at the window and saw her. Their eyes locked. Trelawney's expression of dissipated outrage morphed into one of mortified horror. She stood, mouth agape, and pointed in horror at the lavender unicorn.

It took a moment for Taylor to realize that the thing triggering the misplaced California nut-crunch was the hamburger in Taylor's hooves. Her course of action was obvious; she took the biggest, most jaw-cracking bite out of it that she could and proceeded to noisily and visibly chew, glaring at Trelawney all the while.

Trelawney's mortified squeal was audible right through the glass. Taylor chewed more noisily, taking another enormous bite and getting ketchup and relish all over her face. She stuck her nose to the glass and masticated with her mouth wide open for good measure. “Arm NARM NARM NARM NARM...”

Clockblocker blithely hit his helmet commlink. “Hello, Comms? Hey Vista. Guess what, we're at Fugly Bobs having lunch and the Tambourine Heads are right outside. Yeah, anti-meat protest. Trelawney just saw Ladybird through the glass eating a double cheese with onion rings and is flipping out. Yeah, she-- oh, nice touch... she's wiping her face with the bun now. Trelawney looks like she's about to pop a blood vessel--”

“What? Oh, hello Miss Militia. Okay, so the moment she steps in side she's in violation of the restraining order? Gotcha. Shouldn't be too long...” He paused as Trelawney began banging her open hand on the glass shouting 'stop that!!' at the gluttonous little unicorn. Taylor responded by stuffing some fries and onion rings in her mouth on the next bite. The rest of the diners and the waitstaff were losing it, holding up their smartphones to film the action and laughing their behinds off.

Trelawney finally had enough. She marched to the front doors, her parading minions in her wake, and barged in, the bell on the door jangling as they poured into the dining area. “YOU!” she said, pointing at the guy running the grill with an outstretched finger. She stood tall and defiant as Galadriel at the mirror pool. “Defiler! You desecrate the sacred acolyte's ascension with your ROASTED FLESH OF MURDER!”

The teenager wielding the spatula blinked. “Uh, no, it's _cow,_ I'm pretty sure,” he said.

Trelawney gave him a half-shriek of disgust. She turned to Taylor and all but flung herself on her knees. “Please do not do this, anointed one,” she half-whimpered. “Don't pollute your ascended body with the flesh of innocent animals!”

Taylor gave her a contemptuous look. “Madame Trelawney, what did you tell me your spirit animal was again?”

“The great horned owl, herald of wisdom, and the white fox, who--”

“And what do you think owls and foxes live on-- celery sticks?” Taylor snorted. “Go away, Madame Trelawney,” she sing-songed, “your spirit animals are laughing at you.”

The Tambourine Heads who had followed her in gasped in scandalized shock. Trelawney shot to her feet in a towering rage and opened her mouth to go into one of her famous squalling, honking tirades--

“One potato, two potato, three potato, four--” Clockblocker sang, rapidly touching her shoulder and the shoulders of everyone in her entourage. They immediately froze as his time-stopping power turned them into living statues. The rest of the diner broke out in applause. “Thank yew, thank yew,” Clockblocker said, accepting the cheers with sweeping bows. “This has been a citizen's arrest for violating a restraining order, brought to you by Clockblocker and Ladybird, we're here all week, be sure and TRY THE VEAL--” that earned him an extra gout of laughter. Moments later the BBPD poured in and cuffed the immobile seeress and her faithful acolytes in preparation for hauling them off.

 

* * *

 

“Ugh, I can't STAND that nonsense,” Taylor growled as she clip-clopped down the sidewalk, head hung low.

“It happens,” Clockblocker said, easily keeping pace with her. “You remember reading about this stuff in history class. People with powers first started showing up, people got weird. People started running around saying they were demons, or aliens, or alien demons, or reincarnated gods or angels--” he shrugged. “I remember reading how those fringe religious types used to freak out whenever a cape with wings showed up.” his voice soured a bit. “Before the Simurgh appeared, anyway.” The two capes shuddered.

“At least I've not got any weird fetish groups chasing me,” Taylor muttered.

Clockblocker actually stopped in mid stride. “Uhh. Don't go on the ParaFanfic Online servers,” he said.

Taylor looked back at him. “What??”

“Ladybird, they've already got an entire directory for fanfics just for you,” he said. Her pupils turned to pinpricks and her jaw dropped. “Hey, it's happened to nearly all of us,” Clockblocker hastily added. He scratched the back of his head. “Thank God the mods cracked down on the fics featuring Vista before they even started, but most of them get around age-limit issues by saying it's aged-up or five years in the future or whatever--”

“ _Who the hell are they pairing me up with??”_ Of the half-dozen appalled questions that surged forward to be asked, that was the one that got up.

Clockblocker shrugged. “Most everyone you can think of. Though most of them have the other person transformed into a pony by mad biotinkers or you get transformed into a human or you both get turned into half-human half-pony hybrids--” he was starting to ramble. “Though there are a lot of fiction crossovers too; I saw one where you were in a lesbian relationship with Lady Amalthea from the Last Unicorn--”

Taylor made a nauseated sound. She resumed marching down the street, refusing to look at the time-twisting Cape. “My opinion of you is lowered dramatically just by the fact that you know these things,” she snorted.

“Hey, I didn't WRITE 'em,” he protested, catching up and matching pace with her. “And like I said, it happens to everyone. I mean, one of the biggest subsets of cape fics is lemons about a three-way love triangle between Glory Girl, Gallant, and Dean Stansfield, Glory Girl's boyfriend.”

Taylor's little pony face screwed up in confusion. “but isn't Dean... I mean, uh, isn't Gallant...” It was a rather open secret among the Wards that Glory Girl's boyfriend was also the Ward cape Gallant.

“I know. That's what makes it hilarious,” Clockblocker said, chortling. “It's the ones where _Dean_ ditches Glory Girl to run off with _Gallant_ that disturb him the most...”

“Awwwgh.”

“You just gotta let that stuff roll off your back, Ladybird,” Clockblocker advised. “There's not really any way to stop them, or to get the people on ParaHumansOnline to stop with their weird shipping speculations, or to get nutburgers like that Madame Trelawney to wake up and smell the reality. You just have to...” he shrugged. “Just hold on to the positives.”

“Like what?” Taylor demanded.

“Like how you give people hope.”

“Me? Give people hope?” Taylor scoffed.

Clockblocker looked at her. That blank, full-face visor of his could really be unnerving, Taylor realized. “Yeah, hope. I take it back, go on PHO sometime. For every loony out there who thinks you're some sort of sign of cosmic revelation, or has a really weird thing for plush toys, there's another who talks about how seeing footage of you running around, doing tricks with your power to make little kids laugh, or rescuing kittens from trees, or busting bad guys with your Kickass of Cuteness, made them smile again. How seeing a fairy tale come true made them believe that wonderful things could still happen in this world.” His voice was unusually serious.

Taylor actually had to sit down on the sidewalk for that one. “Wow,” she said. “I... had no idea.” She looked up at Clockblocker, tilting her head and giving him a curious smile. “That's some unusually profound stuff, coming from you.”

“Yeah. I try to keep it light,” Clockblocker said. “There's too much Batman and not enough Spidey out here, you ask me.”

“Who and who?” Taylor said, baffled.

“Batman and Spiderman-- old comic books from, like, the fifties or sixties,” Clockblocker said. “Batman was this super-genius martial arts vigilante with like, a thousand bat-themed gadgets on his utility belt... and so grimdark he shit Shadow Stalkers. No lie.” Taylor snickered."He could be cool, but-- man, he was a DRAG.

“While Spiderman was this college kid who got spider-powers. Super strong and agile, could climb walls like a spider and had a danger-sense... oh, and he had gizmos on his wrists that let him shoot spider webs to tie up crooks.

“I used to read my dad's old comic book collection all the time. I liked Spidey way better than Bats. Because no matter how much danger he was in, or how bad things were, or how scared he was, Spiderman always joked and quipped and even laughed in the bad guy's face. It drove the bad guys berserk and it gave the heroes a boost, and all the citizens he rescued knew everything was going to be okay because 'the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man' was there to save the day.” He sounded almost wistful at the end.

“That's the kind of hero I always wanted to be. That's kind of why I joke around so much. Hey, if I can walk into a crisis and put a smile on somebody's face.... that and I'm actually a goofball.” He waved his hands, indicating all of himself. Taylor chuckled.

“It's... okay, don't spread this around but it's also why I wear this visor,” he went on, indicating his blank visage. “Same reason Spidey wore a mask that covered his whole face. That way, nobody can see how scared we really are.” He fell silent, seemingly a little embarrassed about opening up that much.

Taylor pondered that. He was a Striker, and one with a pretty use-limited power. She never realized how scared he'd have to be, charging into battle against armed thugs and monsters and capes with terrifying powers, hoping that he'd get close enough to 'tag' them with his bare hand before they crushed him like a grape. He basically went out ready to grasp a burning brand with his bare hand every day, over and over again-- and his only concern was to keep other people from being afraid. “That's... pretty cool, actually,” Taylor said. “You're a lot more than I gave you credit for, Clock.”

“Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head,” Clockblocker quipped.

“Hmm.” Taylor tapped her chin with a hoof, squinting. “Web-shooters...” She looked up at Clockblocker suddenly. “Clockblocker, tell me, how does your power know when to stop?”

“Huh?” The question caught him off balance.

“I mean... okay, suppose you grab a guy by their wrist and time stop them. How does your power know to freeze all of him, and not just, say, his shirt? Or a whole car and not just the bumper or door?”

“Oh. Well, some of it seems to be controlled by my intent, but it also spreads,” he said. “Like water filling a glass. The greater the volume the slower the speed, but that's still pretty fast. And of course jumping from one thing to the next that's touching, but not one piece? Slows the whole process down.”

“So it zips along something long and thin really fast, but takes more time to fill up something big and bulky?”

“More or less, yeah. I can freeze a person almost instantly. But say, this whole building and everything in it?” He slapped the wall of the office building they were passing. “Probably up to a minute. And of course I'd be pooped out for a darned long time after doing it. So no, unfortunately I couldn't time-freeze an entire city in an Endbringer attack.”

“Too bad,” she commiserated. "But not what I was aiming for. Let's see... “ her head began bobbing and tipping in the little motions the other Wards had come to recognize as her using her visor to browse the web. The lights flickering across her visor finally stopped. She smiled confidently. “Okay, um, you don't have to listen to me, but... I think I have some ideas how to make your power more useful.”

She could almost hear him raising his eyebrow behind his visor. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, c'mon, according to Google Maps there's a dollar store right around the corner.” She trotted off at a cheerful gait.

“Dollar store?” Confused but curious, Clockblocker followed.

 

* * *

 

The robbery was textbook. The hoodied crook came into the gas station, gun drawn, and demanded cash. The register was emptied-- a ridiculous fifty dollars-- and the robber prepared to flee. He backed out the door, gun held out at the ready.

CLINK!

Something metallic came out of nowhere and latched onto his hand. The _world_ blinked, and suddenly his gun was gone and his wrists and ankles were cuffed. That Ward Cape, Clockblocker was standing there, along with that little pale purple unicorn, who was smirking at him. Clockblocker juggled something metallic and springy between his hands. “And that's why you don't try robbing gas stations in Brockton Bay,” Clockblocker said smugly.

 

* * *

 

“A _Slinky?”_

Armsmaster stared at the springy metal toy in his gauntleted hand. It boggled the imagination, but one of his Wards had used this silly damn thing to stop an armed robbery.

“Cheap, disposable, and self-retracting,” Clockblocker said. “And it turns out, a great way to give me a ranged attack.”

“It sort of came to me when Clockblocker explained that his power propagates through what he touches-- and it can propagate at especially high speed through a thin line or wire,” Taylor said. “Oh we tried several things. My first idea was to let one of my extra-large jumping spiders leap off the end of his fingertip with an anchor line--”

“Yeeeek,” Clockblocker said fervently.

“--But he kept doing that,” Taylor said drily. “So we tried a lot of different things. Thread and fishing line were too dangerous-- it would be like leaving invisible razor wire trailed all over the place! Silly string looked good, but we couldn't figure out a way he could freeze the spray-string without time-freezing the can... But the Slinky worked just about perfectly.”

“I see you attached a neodymium magnet to the end,” Armsmaster pointed out.

“And a couple of wall-tacky things,” Taylor agreed. “To make it stick long enough for Clockblocker's power to cross over to the target.”

“A... novel approach to the problem,” Armsmaster said. “It does seem to have a few drawbacks though.”

“Yeah, it's a bit too bulky to carry more than four or five of these things,” Clockblocker agreed. “And the magnet and wall-tackies won't always stick well.” His voice turned hopeful. “So I was thinking...”

“That I might come up with a more efficient version of your, ah, delivery system?” Armsmaster said. The two nodded. He seemed to think for a minute, walking the slinky between his hands. “Hm, perhaps a hairspring clamp or gripping claw at the end,” he pondered. “Something like a mousetrap. Or one of those molecular cohesion pads Dragon was talking about. Hmmm...”

“Oh, and we also found these things,” Taylor said. She pulled a wooden stick about the size of a pencil out of her bag. It had a roll of decorated paper wrapped around one end. “These 'chinese yo yo' things. You flick the stick and the paper coil comes out.” She gripped the stick in her teeth and shook her head like a dog; the coiled paper reeled out several feet like a corkscrew party favor, then snapped springily back to the stick. “They're only made of paper, but something between the slinky and this might be a more efficient way to wind the springs---”

“I'll work with these a bit, see what I can come up with,” Armsmaster said. He took the chinese yo-yo from Taylor, still distracted by the slinky. “I'll have Kid Win tinker a bit with them too, see if he has any ideas.” He started walking off, muttering to himself about memory metals and ductility. “Oh, and good work today, you two,” he said over his shoulder.

Taylor leaned in to Clockblocker. “Was that for the armed robber we caught, or the slinky?” she muttered.

“Don't care, I'll take kudos where I can get 'em. Brofist!” He held out his fisted hand to her.

“Oh. Uh, bro... Hoof, I guess.” Taylor grinned and bumped the bottom of her hoof against his knuckles.

 


	7. Chapter 7

Taylor looked up the front steps of Arcadia High. Way, WAY up. “In what rip of the fabric of space and time is this possibly a good idea?” she said out loud.

“I'm boggled myself,” Danny Hebert said, looking down at his daughter in a mix of distress and amusement. They sat in his truck out in front of the school, watching everyone come and go.

“Why are they sending Wards to a public school anyway? Wouldn't home schooling or even in-house tutoring be better?”

Danny grimaced. “It would be, but the politics--”

“Ugh, nuff said.”

“--The politics are messy,” he continued, giving her a smile and a look that said he'd prepared a lecture and wasn't going to be thwarted at delivering it. “If the PRT or the Protectorate provided the Wards with in-house tutors, the usual suspects would accuse them of 'isolating the children from outside influences so as to control them.' In this state, the teacher's unions fight homeschooling tooth and nail for the same reason, and the state government obediently writes out miles of regulations to make it pretty much impossible. Same story with correspondence schools.”

“Which is how they get away with having schools like Winslow in their system, right?” Taylor muttered. She was well aware that there had to be more than one Winslow High out there... it was a big state.

“Ding ding ding!” Danny said. “It doesn't matter how bad an option you are, if you're the only option available.” He looked past Taylor at the school. “The only think keeping Arcadia as high quality as it is are tons of alma maters who donate to it regularly-- to say nothing of the tons of bennies they get for having so many Wards attending school there. Plus, having the PRT on your back along with the PTA will keep you on the straight and narrow.”

“A PTA of one-percenters, no less,” Taylor noted. Her gaze swept over the school, her ears twitching back and forth.

“Yeah, that'd definitely help,” Danny agreed idly. “I wouldn't want to be the Principal here. With half a dozen Wards here? I bet she spends most of her time sweating bullets that the lid will come off this box full of crazy and leave her holding the handle.” He paused. “You see your escort yet?”

“No, she said she'd be here waiting for us right at-- oh no wait, there she is!” A pair of girls were walking out the double doors; one was a rather stunning blonde, the other was a somewhat mousier brunette with freckles and a frizzy 'do. Taylor waved a hoof eagerly. “Panacea-- Amy! Over here!”

The healer girl spotted her immediately and waved back. The blonde with her was... more enthusiastic. “That's gotta be her sister Glory Girl,” Danny said.

“What makes you say that?”

Danny snickered.“The way she saw you, clapped her hands to her cheeks and hopped up in the air.” He paused with a grin. “Aaaaand didn't come back down.” The girl could be heard squealing ' _omigosh she's so kyuuute'_ clear across the street. Taylor laughed out loud when Amy started frog-punching Vicky to shut her up-- or trying to. One punch to the arm and the healer was left standing there, grimacing and clutching her bruised knuckles. Taylor snickered into her hoof.

The two Dallon girls made their way to the car as Taylor daintily hopped out. Glory Girl nearly squeed again, but a volley of hissed imprecations from her sister stopped her. “Um, hi,” Taylor said cautiously. “You must be Victoria?”

“Call me Vicky,” the older Dallon sister said with a grin that nearly split her face in half. She bounced on her heels, her hands tucked under her arms as if she was struggling with herself not to reach out and grab something. Taylor could guess what. For some reason Taylor found herself absolutely captivated by how the blonde girl’s hair shone in the sun as she bounced around...

“Vicky! Aura!” Amy hissed, giving her sister another finger-bruising poke. Victoria squeaked, and suddenly Taylor’s head was clear again. She shook her head till her ears flapped. “Sorry about that. Vicky keeps forgetting to tamp down her aura when she’s wound up.” Taylor nodded. She’d heard of Glory Girl’s odd ‘aura of adoration.’ When she cranked it up she could make a crowd of people swoon over her, or send them cringing to the floor in abject terror. It was certainly odd experiencing it in person.

Vicky pooched out her lip and scowled. “I’m not wound up.”

Amy rolled her eyes. “Ignore her,” she said. “She collects Lisa Frank memorabilia.”

“I do not!”

“Do too. The whole room is lined with it.”

“It is NOT!”

“In case you haven’t guessed,” Amy said, ignoring her outraged sister, “I’m Amy Dallon, and I’m to be your guide through the illustrious institution of Arcadia. I’ll be accompanying you to all your classes today to make sure you get your feet and/or hooves under you.” She gave her sister the side-eye. “And so will my sister Vicky Dallon, who wheedled her way into this as well, probably to get out of her algebra test this period--”

“Heyy...”

“Okay, we’ll have to head to the principal’s office to sign you in, get your schedule and all that...” Amy went on. Taylor was only paying partial attention. She was paying more attention to the other Dallon sister. Vicky was standing there in a pose that had gotten very familiar to Taylor over the past few weeks: her hands firmly tucked in her pockets, leaning forward slightly, with a too-wide smile on her face and a sort of strained look in her eyes.

Taylor sighed in weary amusement. She sat down on her rump on the pavement and held up her forehooves to the hovering girl. “Go on, get it out of your system--”

“EEEEEEE!” Vicky snatched the unicorn pony up off the ground and cuddled her like an enormous baby doll.

“Vick-ee!” Amy said, exasperated.

Taylor looked over Vicky’s shoulder at the healer as Vicky rocked her back and forth, an expression of bliss on her face. “One just grows used to it,” Taylor said.

 

 

It took a while, but Amy finally persuaded Vicky to put the unicorn down long enough for her to say goodbye to her father. Once Danny Hebert had driven off (laughing his ass off) and Vicky had managed to get control of herself, they all trooped in through the double doors and into Arcadia.

Amy looked her over. “That’s a… slightly different look from the last time I saw you,” she said.

“Oh this.” Taylor turned about. “The other stuff was for when I was kitted out for superhero stuff. This is more ‘casual dress.’” Her boots had been replaced with some simple hoof slippers. Her panniers were plain tan canvas, and her usual HUD bubble visor had been replaced with a rather large-ish pair of round-lens glasses. “Actually it’s almost the same as all my usual gear; it’s just not as flash.” She tipped her head, sending text scrolling briefly across the inside of her glasses. One of her panniers opened briefly; a small robotic gripper poked out and waved at them, making Amy squeak in surprise. “Kinda need it for most day to day stuff,” she said a bit ruefully as the gripper retreated back into the pannier.

“Why the robo-claw? Don’t you have telekinesis?” Vicky asked.

“Yeah, but I can’t levitate things _indefinitely,_ ” Taylor said. “And sometimes I need to hold something in place while I fiddle with something else. ...Plus, it’s sort of a field test for some new tech,” she added in a confidential tone. “Something Armsmaster and Dragon are working on to help the disabled.” Both Dallon girls made silent ‘o’s and nodded.

“Well, they shouldn’t give you any trouble about using it, then,” Amy said. “Handicapped accessibility, and all that. And you do sort of qualify-- no offense.”

Taylor shrugged. “Won’t deny it. Magical super floaty powers or not, you learn real quick just how much you’re going to miss having thumbs.” She stepped back as Vicky opened the office door for her. “Thank you.”

Taylor could immediately tell things were different here. The administrative office of the school was light, airy, open, and had a clean professional look… what she could see of it. Once again the disadvantages of being a knee-high mythical ungulate were asserting themselves, as she was currently looking UP at the underside of the front counter. “Hello, girls,” she heard a woman’s voice say. “Weren’t you supposed to be escorting a new student today?” The voice said with a lilt of curiosity.

“Hello, Mrs. Mann. What-- oh, she’s right here, wait a minute--” without warning Amy bent down and stuck her hands under Taylor’s armpits.

“Hey!”

Amy heaved the little unicorn up off the floor so she could see over the counter top. Taylor waved a hoof feebly at the middle aged, bun-haired lady behind the counter. “Uh, hello,” she said with an awkward smile.

Mrs. Mann looked surprised for a moment, but quickly pulled up an impressive poker face. “Ah, you must be Taylor Hebert, aka Ladybird,” she said. As if she dealt with lavender superhero unicorns every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

“That’s me,” Taylor said. “Amy, put me down please? No, not-- not on the floor, up on the-- oof!” she had her purple rump plunked down on the counter. “Aheh.”

Mrs. Mann heroically suppressed a grin. “I understand you’ll be using some, ah, specialized equipment for your particular needs while you’re here?” She asked.

“Um, yes. A laptop computer with HUD glasses, and some quarter horsepower waldoes,” Taylor said. The grippers popped out, clicked their metal fingers, and retracted. The secretary barely even raised an eyebrow.

“Well it’s unusual but it’s nothing that wouldn’t be covered under Equal Access rules,” she said. “If you ever want to bring in any _other_ equipment… from your, ah, _after school job_ … we will need to be notified in advance.” Taylor nodded in understanding. She could just see Kid Win absentmindedly dragging a lunchbox full of his half-finished widgets and doohickeys to school if anybody let him. “And here is your schedule, the school rulebook and a few other odds and ends...” she said, holding out a trapper-keeper folder. Taylor deftly plucked it out of her hand with her telekinesis and slipped it into one of her panniers.

“And here--” the secretary dropped a stack of hardback books onto the countertop next to Taylor with a thump that made the unicorn squeak in surprise-- “are your textbooks. Lunch is in about ten minutes; your last two classes of the day after that are Computer Sciences and English Lit, so you’ll want to keep those with you.”

Taylor nodded and floated the two books into her panniers, while Vicky made to show off her muscles and grabbed the rest of the stack. “We’ll just pop these in your locker on the way,” she said cheerfully. Mrs. Mann gave Amy a slip of paper with the locker number and combination. “Locker 123-A, first floor,” she said. “Have a good first day, Ladybird.”

“Thanks,” Taylor said, hopping down to the floor. Her booties made a soft thump as they hit the tile.

The three trotted off to find Taylor’s new locker, Vicky prattling every step of the way about the teachers, who was strict, who was easygoing, who was a colossal bore, which of the kids were in the in-crowd (her and all her friends, natch, but there were pretenders to the throne)… Taylor found it privately amusing that Glory Girl chattered about “Dennis” and “Chris” but seemed to have no clue that the two she described were actually Clockblocker and Kid Win. Surely she knew her boyfriend was actually Gallant…?

“Ah, here it is,” Amy said, coming to a halt. “123-A.” Vicky and Taylor stopped as well. They were all standing in front of a locker with a bright industrial orange painted door and a built-in combination lock. “Here, let me get the lock,” Amy said. She spun the dial, quickly clicking it back and forth, and yanked the handle. “Ta da,” she said as the door swung open.

Taylor looked up at the open locker. As a human it would have been taller than her; as a knee-high little unicorn pony it loomed. The inside was dark flat gray and it seemed to grow wider and taller as she looked and it filled her vision from top to bottom and side to side big enough now to swallow her whole and even though her hooves were rooted to the floor _it was getting closer and--_

“Taylor? Taylor!” Vicky was shouting. “Taylor, what’s wrong?” Taylor shook all over. Somehow she’d backed all the way across the hall without realizing it. Her rump was pressed against the wall, her legs stiff and her hooves pushing her back.

“Taylor? Ladybird, what’s wrong?” Amy said, startled. One moment Taylor had been perfectly calm. But the moment the locker door had swung open the tiny unicorn’s pupils had shrunk to dots. She’d let out a whinny, an actual whinny of fear and backpedaled into the far wall. She was pressed against it even now, head lowered, ears laid flat, one forehoof raised as if ready to kick out at whatever was in front of her. Amy had gone to a dude ranch one year at the age of ten (dragged there by Vicky, who had been going through her ‘crazy about horses’ phase at the time.) She hadn’t exactly been over the moon about the trip but she did remember a few things the ranch hands had taught them all, one of them being how to read a horse’s body language. And this particular pony was absolutely frightened out of her mind. “What…. What is--”

It was Vicky who figured it out first. “Ohmy-- oh jeez, _it’s the locker,”_ she said.

“Ohmigosh,” Amy said. It took no more than that to clue her in; Thanks to the internet, Taylor’s triggering event had become the second most infamous bullying incident since Carrie’s night as homecoming queen. Mentally kicking herself Amy crouched down and shuffled forward, reaching for the traumatized filly. “Oh look at her, she’s _shaking--_ ”

“Taylor, it’s okay Taylor-- No more locker, see?” Vicky said as Amy scooped the shivering Ladybird up. Vicky hastily slammed the gaping door of the locker shut. It responded to this rough treatment by promptly springing back open. Vicky gave them both an awkward grin and slammed it again. The steel door naturally sprang back open again. She grabbed it by the latch and proceeded to do a minor jazz-hands routine with it, trying to get the latch to catch but jerking it open and closed too fast for it to fall in place. “Shut you friggin--” she growled.

Amy and Taylor stared as Brockton Bay’s mightiest flying brick proceeded to do battle with a locker door-- and lose. The farcical struggle went on for several seconds, till Vicky finally handled the problem in her own, world famous style: She got mad and punched it. With a _Skrunch_ of tortured metal the locking mechanism was mashed flat, the door bent inward around it like a prize fighter curled up around a punched gut.

Taylor gasped. It was easy to forget just how casually strong Glory Girl really was. “Vicky!!” Amy yelped.

“Ack!” Vicky looked around with panic in her eyes. “Wait, I can fix it, I can fix it,” she said. She pulled the door open (it took some effort; she really had jammed it into its frame with that punch) and began to woingle it back and forth in her hands like a housewife trying to straighten out a mashed foil pan. That was the final straw; with a sad little series of pings the pin hinges snapped, leaving the teen heroine standing there holding a mangled locker door in her hands.

Amy stood there and stared. The unicorn cradled in her arms stared. One or the other, but Vicky would bet on the unicorn, let out a tiny _snerk._

Calmly, without a word, Vicky set the battered door down. She picked up Taylor’s books where she had dropped them and stacked them neatly inside the now-doorless locker. Then she picked up the door and ever-so-gently placed it in the opening, balancing it just so, and crimped the frame with her fingertips to hold it in place. She gave the two a beaming smile. “There, all done. Now what say we go to lunch…?”

“Vicky,” Amy said. Her voice was incredibly world-weary.

“Nobody saw anything--” Vicky started.

“Vicky--”

“It could have been anyone that broke that door! Hypothetically… I mean, like, the football team---”

“What, were they supposed to have tried to _eat_ it?” Amy snarked.”That door looks like Hellhound’s dogs used it for a chew toy!”

“Look, all we need is to be somewhere else when the custodian finds it--” Vicky pleaded.

“Too late,” someone said. Vicky froze and turned around. Standing down at the end of the hallway was a middle-aged man with a name badge that said “Smith,” a toolbelt and an incredibly seen-it-all expression on his face.

 

 

“Well there goes my allowance until NEXT summer,” Vicky said sourly, stabbing her straw into her milk. She drained the pint carton till the sides crumpled.

“You’re assuming Mom and Dad don’t just divert it permanently into paying for accident liability insurance,” Amy snipped, taking a healthy bite out of her pita roll.

“You mean someone would actually give Collateral Damage Barbie insurance?” Dennis snickered. “Ow! Hey, quit it!”

Vicky had reached across the table and grabbed the redhead by the ear. “How many times a day do I gotta threaten your life?” she said, smiling sweetly.

“Okay, okay, ixnay on the Arbie-Bay!” She released the ear. Dennis sat back down, rubbing his reddened ear and scowling. “Gee, can’t imagine where anyone got the idea you have a _temper...”_

“The same place they get the idea you have a sense of humor,” Vicky sniped back. Dennis mimed being struck in the chest by an arrow and keeled over.

It wasn’t normal for all the teen capes in Arcadia to be sitting together at the same table for lunch. Normally they avoided “cliqueing up,” as Kid Win put it, to avoid generating suspicion about their secret identities. Even if they were best friends as Wards, they had to act as if they were complete strangers… except for Gallant, aka Dean, who was dating Vicky (as Dean) and had to act like they were complete strangers (as Gallant)… and it was unclear whether Vicky and/or Amy knew Dean’s secret identity or not--

Taylor shook her head. _Then in comes the little lavender unicorn to make things even MORE confusing,_ she thought. Taylor, aka Ladybird, basically had to kiss any hope of a secret identity goodbye, thanks to how she’d Triggered. But of course she still had to keep track of who knew her as Ladybird, the celebrity magical little unicorn they’d seen on TV and who knew here personally and when and why and then there were friends of a friend and...

Keeping track of who knew who and in what identity was such a pain in the plot she could totally sympathize with New Wave and their tragically failed effort to start a legacy of unmasked capes. She wasn’t crazy enough to recommend it, though, and neither was anyone else after what had happened.

Vicky and Amy’s whole family had publicly unmasked when they were just little kids. They’d begun talking about a ‘new age of accountability’ for capes… and then some maniac looking to score points with Kaiser and the Empire Eighty Eight had murdered one of them. It had gone very bad and very ugly for said maniac; judging by what was left of the body, Kaiser himself had killed the man for breaking the unwritten rules. But the damage was done; noone, hero, villain or PRT, even joked about giving up the unwritten rules, especially secret identities, after that.

Of course there were capes like Taylor who simply couldn’t keep a secret identity because their powers made them too distinctive. Quite a few, in fact. (Particularly case 53s, the mystery capes with three things in common: complete amnesia about their pasts, powers that altered or mutated them into obvious, less-than-human forms, and a strange “C” shaped tattoo somewhere on their bodies.) But beyond the obvious hazards of the “mask free life”, Taylor was learning there were other drawbacks as well. Like privacy. It was a rare day indeed when she could go out in public without being swarmed by people wanting a photograph or an autograph or, it seemed, just to annoy the hell out of her with questions ranging from the repetitive and banal to the weird and disturbing.

Of course this time it had played to her advantage-- sort of. The moment Vicky and Amy had walked into the cafeteria escorting Ladybird, everyone in the room had (naturally) swarmed the table they sat at to try and finagle a seat next to the newest cape in the Bay. Vicky, however, was Queen Bee of the school, and Her Majesty had promptly issued a decree that everyone in the school couldn’t possibly sit around a single table at the same time, so _everybody_ _could just_ _return to their seats and leave the new student alone._ She’d even sent her regular in-crowd off (“just this once, guys, let me get Ladybird here situated.”) In all the bustle, of course, the Brockton Bay Wards all managed to discreetly hang back and secure the few seats that _were_ available. Dean had been buttonholed by his girlfriend to go fetch Amy, Taylor and Vicky’s lunches from the cafeteria line; Dennis had been commandeered to fetch a couple of chairs; she had tagged Chris to sit with them because he was on the computer club and the school chess team…

Taylor had more than a niggling suspicion that the Ward’s carefully-maintained secret identities weren’t even tissue thin to Vicky.

“So what happened this time?” Kid Win-- _Chris, call him Chris when he’s not in his mask, Taylor reminded herself_ \-- asked.

“Taylor had a… well she had an attack of PTSD,” Amy said. “Related to her Trigger Event.” She winced as she said it. It was usually seriously taboo to talk about people’s Triggers.

“I don’t know what happened,” Taylor said, her face hot. “Vicky opened the locker for me and the next thing I know, I...”

Sounds of understanding went up. “No need to say any more,” Carlos said, holding up a hand. “We shoulda figured on something like that...”

“--I mean, what a stupid phobia to have,” Taylor went on, lamenting. “A fear of _lockers?_ ”

“If phobias made sense, they wouldn't be phobias. It's right in the definition, _irrational_ fears. Anyways, it’s not a phobia, exactly,” Carlos corrected. “It's PTSD. Phobias fixate on one thing. PTSD? All sorts of weird things can trigger it-- sights, sounds, smells… anything that brings back the memory of the trauma.” He paused at the other’s looks. “They've been teaching us to look for the signs. Um. With the kind of stuff I do...” He busied himself with peeling open a mayo packet and putting it on his sandwich.

Great. She could have another panic attack at any time, and no clue what might trigger it. SO much better than a phobia. “What did you mean by… uh, never mind,” Taylor said, glancing around the table.

“What?” Carlos asked. Taylor looked meaningfully over at the only two non-Wards at the table. “Oh, them. Uh, yeah, they know,” he said, giving the two girls a slightly rueful look.

“Hey, I’m not _that_ blonde,” Vicky said, giving her hair a toss over her shoulder. “Dean and I are _dating._ I’d have to be pretty dumb-- and _deaf--_ not to recognize his voice after him whispering naughty things in my ear.” She smirked and Dean blushed. Amy on the other hand scowled like a raincloud had passed overhead. What was that all about, Tayler wondered? “And the rest of ‘em it wasn’t too hard to figure out. I just had to watch and see who in Arcadia was hanging around with Dean and trying hard to _look like_ they weren’t hanging around with Dean.” She propped up her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand. “Of course some were easier to figure out than others. Pathetically so.” She gave Dennis a smug smirk.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Dennis demanded loftily.

Vicky tapped her chin with her finger. “Hmmm, gee, who do I know at Arcadia who’s _dumb enough_ to think it’d be _funny_ to call themselves ‘Clock Blocker’ on _national T.V_.? Hmmmm, it’s such a mystery--”

The others laughed while Dennis pulled a rude face at Vicky. “Really, guys, should we be talking about this here?” Taylor said with a worried frown. “This cafeteria is full of people who could overhear.”

Chris-- Kid Win-- shook his head and tapped a small box on his belt that Taylor had thought was an old-fashioned Walkman. “Anti Eavesdropping Acoustic Barrier,” he said. “Makes a barrier that imitates and reflects the crowd noises around us back out. Anyone more than a foot or two away just hears more crowd noises.” He grinned. “And ‘Tinkers are B.S., yeah, I know.”

Taylor mentally shrugged it off. That wasn’t even the most comic-bookish-weird thing she’d dealt with in the past _hour._ “What did you mean ‘you should have known?’” She asked Carlos.

Carlos shrugged, looking awkward. “As team leader of the Wards, the PRT ends up giving me dossiers on everyone,” he said. “Even the psych evals. Aaaand now that sounds super creepy,” he went on when he caught Taylor’s expression. “Sorry...”

“No, no, I get-- I get why,” Taylor said, waving a hoof in dismissal. “It’s just, well, out of all of us here I feel like I’m the only one running around with all my dirty laundry hanging out in the breeze.” She tried to laugh it off, but anyone at the table could read the expression on her face. (With her wide cartoonish eyes it was almost impossible not to, she had already learned much to her chagrin.)

The way in which Capes got their powers was supposed to largely a mystery, and the PRT went out of its way to keep what the public knew about it as vague as possible. But once Taylor had joined the Wards she’d gotten the new-member flyleaf handout version given to her: All Capes, regardless of their powers, Triggered the same way. They went through what was literally the worst, most horrible day of their lives. The kind that left lifelong scars. And normally even talking about it was as taboo as breaking the Unwritten Rules.

Normally. But at that moment something was bubbling to the surface that was urging them all to speak out.

There was a moment of awkward silence while everyone suddenly focused on their meals. Chris suddenly spoke up. “Mine was when the repo men showed up,” he said. Everyone paused in mid-bite and looked at him. He ran his fingers through his hair. “My family, we’re not… we weren’t… well off,” he laboriously spelled out. “Things were really bad right then. Mom and Dad in debt, Dad out of work, and _everything_ always breaking down… and here come the repo men, taking the car.” He laughed awkwardly. “Mom flipped out, went into hysterics and dad wasn’t much better. The way they were talking we were all going to be out in the street in a week. I just locked myself in my room and stuffed my fingers in my ears and wished to God I could just-- just FIX things-- make something, ANYTHING that worked--”

“And you passed out, and woke up with the engineer’s manual from Star Trek in your head,” Dennis said.

Chris snorted. “Yeah. Didn’t help one darn bit, either. Instead of fixing the broken appliances, I just kept going into Tinker Fugues and waking up with the toaster oven and the TV in pieces all over the house and some new half-finished doohickey I couldn’t remember making sitting on the coffee table. Didn’t THAT make Mom happy.” The others laughed, just a bit. “Fortunately Armsmaster spotted me one day when I was out scrounging for parts, spotted the signs, and got me on board with the Wards. Things have been… well, not great but _better_ with a little more cash coming in.” He grinned and made a mock toast with his milk carton in Ladybird’s direction. “And thanks to our resident legal shark in a unicorn suit, there’s more of _that_ now too.”

The others laughed, but Taylor blushed. “Don’t thank me, thank Amy and Vicky’s Mom,” she said. “She’s the barracuda with a briefcase, not me.”

“Still...” Chris said.

Carlos grimaced. “Couple of guys at my old school-- gang bangers-- liked to use me for a punching bag every now and then. One day they switched up to knives.” His grimace soured and he shook his head. “They went bugnuts. Fifteen stab wounds, in pretty much all my major organs.” Amy and Taylor gasped. “Maybe it was my imagination, but I remember _feeling_ my organs shutting down, one by one. If my powers hadn’t kicked in on the ambulance ride--” he shuddered. Dean put his hand on Carlos’ shoulder. Nothing more needed to be said.

Dennis leaned back in his seat, balancing on the back two legs, ruminating. “Mine was when I was in the hospital,” he said, staring at the ceiling.

“Were you injured?” Vicky said.

Dennis didn’t move his eyes from the ceiling tiles. “I was getting bone marrow extracted,” he said, his voice uncommonly flat. Amy wasn’t the only one to grimace. “My Dad has cancer… Leukemia. They wanted to test mine, see if I was a compatible donor. I insisted actually.” He pursed his lips. “I was lying there butt in the air with a doctor driving a needle into my spine and I overhear a couple of the labcoats and nurses outside the door, who apparently _thought_ they were using their indoor voices, muttering about how it was pointless, that Dad probably couldn’t go through the procedure anyway because reasons, too far gone, yada yada… took me a second after I woke back up to notice the doctor was standing _really_ still...just glad he pulled the needle out before my power set in...”

“Your father--?” Vicky yelped, then dropped her voice to a near-whisper. “ Has cancer?? Why didn’t you say something?? Amy would have fixed him right up, right Ames?” She looked at her sister. Amy looked a little guilt-stricken, but she nodded. “See? Why didn’t you come to us?”

“But we did,” Dennis said, his feet hitting the floor. “We went through the hospital system, got on the waiting list--” an old pain crossed his face.

It was all about triage, Taylor realized. Even with miracle healers like Panacea around, there were just too many sick and injured and not enough miracle to go around easily. Every Cape with healer powers, no matter how trivial or how rife with bad side effects, was booked solid for months and even years in advance.

And they had to be booked. Back when the world had first started learning about the extent of Amy’s healing powers as Panacea, people had swarmed her. Swamped her. Her family and the hospital Amy worked through had to establish a strict, seemingly stone-hearted policy of forcing all people actively seeking Panacea’s help or the help of any other Cape healer to file for it through a multi-layered bureaucracy. Between that, the healing she did at the local E/R, and the healing she did at the Endbringer fights, she had to deal with an unending torrent of patients… but without the system they had set up that torrent would have been a flood that drowned her.

“I’m sorry, Dennis,” Amy blurted out. “We, I just didn’t know.” A look of resignation crossed her face. “Look, we’ll fly right out to see your Dad, right after school.”

Dennis looked like someone seeing a sunrise he’d never hoped to see. “R-really?” he said.

“No, of course not. Your Dad can just die of cancer,” Amy said, a little waspish. “Honestly, what do you think of me?? What’s the address?” she pulled out a pen and one of her notebooks.

“S-sorry...” Dennis stuttered. “...it’s room 14 at the, uh, terminal cancer ward in St. Jude’s… and Amy?” He looked more sober than Taylor had ever seen him. “Thank you.”

“Geez,” Vicky said with a half-laugh. The humor was strained. “After what all you’ve been through, you must think I’m the biggest wuss in the galaxy.” She ran her fingers through her hair and looked away from everyone.

Taylor was puzzled for a moment, then memory cleared things up. That was right, everyone knew Vicky’s power-story; Vicky had Triggered after getting fouled during a basketball game. She’d celebrated by promptly flying up to the basket and doing a slam-dunk… which had cost them the game, as powers were against the rules now. Taylor had never really thought about it before, and yeah, second-generation capes did supposedly Trigger easier. But she had to agree; it did seem sort of wimpy. Getting fouled in a game? Really?

“There was a lot going on in the background most people don’t know about,” Amy said, suddenly defensive of her sister.

“Like what?” Taylor asked.

Amy puffed up a little and scowled, but Victoria spoke. “A lot of stuff,” she said. “Family… issues. And stuff.” She tried to look casual about it.

“Think about it, Ladybird,” Amy said sullenly. “We were just talking about how Capes get their powers by literally going through a Day from Hell. The kind that gives you flashbacks and trauma--” she glared pointedly at Taylor, who winced. “-- and scars that last your whole life. And _literally every single member of our family is a Cape._ Do the math.”

“A little less ‘Brady Bunch’ than it looks, and a little more ‘Married With Children,’ I’m guessing?” Dennis quipped. Vista wasn’t available, so Taylor telekinetically dope-slapped him. “Ow.”

Amy relented. "Sorry. Didn't mean to snap..."

Vicky slumped. “Yeah, look… Mom is a real type A-plus personality. Which is great if she’s your lawyer; not so hot if she’s your Mom. She’s always been… kinda difficult to live with. Dad… he’s got clinical depression. Even when he takes his meds he’s barely there sometimes.

“About the time of the game, Mom and Dad were having real troubles. Dad was hitting a really bad low with his depression, which was stressing Mom out. And when Mom gets stressed, everybody else gets stress too. She was leaning real hard on me and Amy all the time, pushing hard on our grades, on our futures, ya-de-ya-da… I wasn’t even sixteen yet and she was already pushing for me to get a sports scholarship, talking about how there were talent scouts from every college in the country at the game... Of course it was the Championships, first time in years we’d gotten that far, so the coach was leaning on us pretty hard too.

“And I was pretty wound up because people were noticing for the first time ‘hey, that’s Victoria Dallon! From that whole family of capes, right?’ ‘Yeah, why hasn’t SHE Triggered yet?’ And the other girls on the team were giving me a lot of crap, some of ‘em were saying I only got on the team because of who my parents were--” she waved a hand in the air, rolling her eyes like she was pretending it was nothing.

“Well, between all the crap at home and at school and the team, I was just sick of it all. I decided I was getting out. Oh You Tee. I even had a big master plan. I was going to win that championship trophy. Then I was going to get on the inside track for a sports scholarship like everyone was talking about. Then the _instant_ the ink was dry on that scholarship, I was going to blow this dump.” She smirked ruefully. “I was going to take a scholarship at the college the farthest away from Brockton Bay as I could get, rent a little apartment for me and Amy, and get us both out of all that mess. Maybe even change my name if that’s what it took--”

“Well, we get to the day of the game. The last few seconds are counting down, we’re down by one, everyone’s wound like someone tightened a watch spring with a wrench. And I’ve got the ball, I’m headed down the court to make the winning layup-- and BAM! I got fouled.

“By a girl on OUR TEAM.”

“What?” Dennis said, half choking on a mouthful of potato chips.

“Priscilla Peters. She’d resented me from the day I joined the team, thought I was stealing her place. Still, I never woulda thought she’d throw the championship game just to ruin things for me, but… there you go.” Vicky picked an apple off her lunch tray and polished it a little viciously. “She crowded in to trip me, knocked me out of bounds. She managed to made it look like one of the other team did it, but-- I’m getting up off the floor, and she looks back and gives me this look, you know? I knew it was her, and she knew, and she knew I knew--” she bit into the apple savagely.

“And I look up in the stands” she said around a mouthful of apple. “And there’s my Mom looking mad and disappointed-- the whole _school_ looking mad and disappointed-- and my big brilliant master escape plan has gone gablooey all over the floor right in front of me--” she swallowed. “And yeah, that’s when I triggered.

She laughed suddenly. “And they give us a penalty throw, and wouldn’t you know my powers kick in and I start flying _right then?_ Turns out, and most people don’t know this, but my flight power sort of defaults to ‘on.’ If I get agitated and I’m not paying attention, I go airborne. And I didn’t even know I had a flight power then-- I step up to the foul line, get ready to throw, and the next thing I know I’m in the air and headed for the basket. _”_ Her smile turned sour. “That’s the thing that kills me the most. Do you realize that if I had just… _stayed on the ground_ for two more stinking minutes… done the free throws, gotten the two points… we still would’ve won and everything would’ve worked out?” She dropped the half-eaten apple on her tray with a thunk. “But no.”

“At least in all the excitement about me getting powers, Mom forgot to be upset at me for ‘blowing my big opportunity.’” Vicky made quote marks in the air. “Of course now every Cape on the planet thinks I'm a Snowflake for how I got my powers...namely, without losing a limb, a family member, bladder control..."

"Not every wound bleeds on the outside, Vicky." Carlos said. There were sounds of agreement around the table. Dean put his arm around her shoulder for comfort; she smiled briefly at the rest of the table in mute thanks.

"...Aaand, now that I have powers," Vicky went on,  "Mom wants to practically have me surgically attached to New Wave for life. Every other sentence is about how whatever I’m doing will make New Wave look, think of New Wave’s reputation, New Wave this and New Wave that. Boy is she in for a surprise when I turn eighteen. Me and Ames are gone, and that’s gospel.” She proceeded to scarf down her sandwich.

“Why take Amy?” Carlos said out of the blue. “I mean, yeah, it has to be kinda lousy for her too, but...”

Amy and Vicky traded a long, very uncomfortable look. “Go ahead and tell them,” Amy said. “It’s nothing they won’t figure out.” She snorted. “The PRT probably has a file on it someplace.” She tucked her head down and looked away, scowling. Carlos looked a little embarrassed. _He probably knows way more than anyone ought to about the private lives of Capes, just because he's Ward leader,_ Taylor thought. _Awkward._

“Mom… isn’t very fond of Amy,” Glory Girl finally said. It was like the words were painful to say.

Amy spun back around in her seat and faced them all. “I’m adopted,” she said bluntly, with the air of someone delivering a _fait accompli._ “And it wasn’t Carol Dallon’s idea. In fact to go by the conversations Vicky and I have overheard over the years between her and Aunt Sarah, she was dead set against it.”

Several jaws dropped around the table. “Then why--?”

“Probably because she felt responsible for me being homeless,” Amy snapped, cheeks flushing. “My father was a supervillain--- one she helped put away.” She rubbed her arms with her hands as if she was trying to warm herself. “It was so long ago, I can’t remember anything more about him… just a bunch of adults having a big fight in our house while I hid in a closet. Then the police taking my father away--- I can’t even remember his face; just that he was my Daddy and he was going away-- while Carol and Aunt Sarah argued over who I would go with while I cried..” her chin crumpled a little then smoothed. “I guess Carol lost _that_ argument.”

“That’s… awful,” Carlos said, stricken.

“It gets better,” Amy snarked. “Whoever my father was, Mom apparently had _real issues_ with him. She’s been convinced from day one that because he was a villain, I was going to turn out to be just as evil as him.” Oh yeah,” she said to their astounded looks. “Bad egg, bad seed, blood will tell, I’ve heard em all, whenever she was ranting to Aunt Sarah about me, whenever she thought I wasn’t in earshot. And a couple of times when I was.

“Once I got powers, though-- well, now she thinks I’m going to turn into a cackling supervillainess the instant her back is turned.”

“But you’re a _healer!_ ” Taylor exploded. “The world’s greatest and most powerful healer, to boot! Forget what powers you ended up with,” she said, waving a hoof in negation as Amy seemed about to protest. “Good powers doesn’t mean good people. And it seems pretty obvious to me that with a little imagination you could still use those powers to do pretty awful things.” At this, Amy seemed to freeze. “But you _didn’t._ You’ve spent every day of your life since you got those powers using them to _heal_ _people._ Of your own free will! Doesn’t that mean anything to her?”

“If emotional problems made sense, nobody would have any,” Dennis quipped, his voice sober.

“That’s, that’s just not fair to you, Amy,” Taylor said firmly. She was getting more than a little angry about it. “You’re a good person, and-- and you deserve better than that. Anybody would deserve better than that.”

“That’s why I’m taking her with me when I make my Big Escape,” Vicky said with cheerful defiance, throwing her arm around her sister’s shoulder. For some reason Amy cringed a bit at her sister’s embrace? No, Taylor decided, she’d imagined it. Or maybe Glory Girl had used a little bit too much strength again.

“Hey, what about me?” Dean teased.

“Oh, I’ll definitely be bringing my boytoy along,” Vicky said confidently. No, Taylor definitely didn’t imagine the sour look that flitted across Amy’s face that time. “No extra rooms in our little apartment needed. We’ll just stick you in the linen closet for safekeeping.”

“Well, _this_ little shindig got kind of heavy fast, didn’t it.” Dennis said. There was a certain amount of less than cheerful assent from the rest.

“Well, we could always go back to talking about Vicky’s Most Embarrassing Moments,” Amy said with a sly look.

“Hey!”

“You mean besides beating up mean ol’ lockers in the name of poor cute li’l unicorns everywhere?” Dennis teased. “And is that ‘ever,’ or just this week?”

“Heyyyy--!”

The mood slowly lifted as Amy proceeded to regale everyone with stories of her sister’s more, ah, _interesting_ gaffes from when she was new to her super powers. Vicky would have retaliated with a few stories of her own, but things being what they were she was in short supply on dirt on her sister. Unfortunately everyone else had dirt on _her_ …. She ended up sitting there sulking with her arms crossed while the others swapped stories of some of Vicky’s more outrageous pratfalls at Arcadia.

“Well, as much fun as it would be to relive highlights like Vicky’s first, and LAST, day helping out in the cafeteria…” Dennis stage-whispered to Taylor. “Spaghetti hanging from the light fixtures, no lie...” he resumed his normal voice. “...I think it’s about time some of us started slipping away at random intervals so as to divert suspicion?” That said, he got to his feet and slid his tray off the table, then made a big show of seeing someone across the room. “Yo, Keith! We still on for that Guild Raid at the end of the week…?” He sauntered off.

“Likewise,” Chris said with a rueful smile. “Gotta get to remedial math early--”

“Remedial math?” Taylor said, surprised. A _tinker_ who needed help with _math_? Did not compute, pun intended.

“Yyyeah. I got dyscalculia,” Chris muttered. “My stupid power didn’t fix that. Oh no, of course not... not like a super engineer might need basic skills at math.” He pulled the little box off his belt and slid it across to Dean. “In case you wanna keep chewing the fat without people listening in,” he said.

“Don’t bother,” Dean said, turning it off and sliding it back. “Looks like we’re gonna be joined by some civvies in a second anyway.” Almost as he spoke, two preppy-looking girls-- a pair of Vicky’s usual hangers-on (good or evil, school princesses always had hangers-on, Taylor reflected) slid into Chris and Dennis’ vacated seats. Amy rolled her eyes but said nothing. She was apparently familiar with them and thought little of them. As little as she possibly could, Taylor would guess from Amy’s expression.

“Hiyeee,” one of the new girls said. “We saw everybody was peeling off and figured it was cool to sit with you again,” she said to Vicky. “It is cool, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, shame on you for running us off, Vick,” the other said with a mock pout. “We know Miss Popular is hella busy, but really--” She threw a very practiced looking smile over at Taylor. “So, aren’t you going to introduce us to the new Cape?”

 

 

Before the lunch hour was out, several people had managed to infiltrate and “introduce themselves” as one Ward or another drifted away. After what felt like the hundredth round of hellos, squees, questions ranging from the peculiar to the inane and generic ‘oh how cutes’ Taylor had more than enough. Thankfully Amy picked up on it, and pleaded getting Ladybird to her next class (Computer Tech, thank heaven!) so the two of them could make their escape. Vicky, on the other hand, had English on the other end of the school, much to her disappointment. She and her entourage had to head the other direction when the bell rang.

“Looks like you and I have the same computer class,” Amy said. “Bit of good luck I suppose.” She looked down at the unicorn trotting along beside her. “Taylor… Ladybird… I’d appreciate it if you sort of forgot all Vicky was saying about us leaving New Wave and running off together and all that--”

“Oh, of course,” Taylor said hurriedly. “Even if it wasn’t all Unwritten Rules stuff everyone was talking about-- I’d never want to air someone else’s dirty laundry!” _Unlike Emma,_ Taylor thought to herself with a touch of bitterness. To Emma precious confidences were just another weapon. “I can’t imagine Vicky plotting to ‘run away from home’ would go over too popular with your parents, either.”

“It’s not just that.” Amy slowed her pace down the hall and rubbed her forehead. “I was talking more about the ‘us running off _together_ ’ thing.”

“I don’t get it.” Taylor stopped and looked up at her, a puzzled expression on her face.

Amy ran a hand down over her face. “Look. Um. This is… screw it. A while back, I… had a crush on Vicky.”

Taylor gave her a long slow blink. “What.”

“Look, it _happens,_ ” Amy said in an explosive burst under her breath, even as she looked up and down the hall to make sure noone was close. “Girls hitting puberty and still figuring out their hormones often get crushes on older girls… or that’s what my therapist said anyway.” She rolled her eyes. “On top of that, I was orphaned, I was alienated, I was messed up, and Vicky took me under her wing, wanted to be ‘best Big Sister ever’ when even my ‘Mom’ wanted nothing to do with me. She was my rock.

“Then, on top of all that, just about the time I get my first period-- she gets her powers.” She paused meaningfully.

Taylor made a silent “Oh” and nodded. “The aura.”

“Which she STILL doesn’t control very well,” Amy said irritably. “It’s almost as bad as her flying every other step. What you got hit with earlier? It’s nothing compared to what it was like when she first got it. A few months of getting whammied by her ‘love me, adore me, worship me’ field and I was dragging her off to our room to confess my undying love for her.” She snorted. “That went well. It freaked Vicky the hell out. Then Carol found out and she REALLY freaked out. The next thing I know we’re double-booking Dad’s therapist for whole-family sessions, to un-screw my head so we all didn’t end up on a special episode of Maury Povich.”

“Vicky completely spazzed, thinking that her aura had ‘turned me gay,’” Amy quoted. “I think her coping mechanism has been to go into denial; sort of shut it out of her mind that it ever happened. The rest of us, the therapost sort of concluded that my crush was just a weird thing triggered by being exposed to Vicky’s aura so much, and he instructed me to do mental exercises to learn to distinguish when my feelings were really my own, that sort of thing.” Her smile turned wry. “We could’ve stood a lot more family counseling, but Carol ended the sessions once she decided we were all ‘fixed’-- which coincidentally was about the point the shrink’s discussions started poking around our OTHER family issues.” Her smirk was as dry as a martini.

“Do you… still feel that way? About Vicky?” Taylor asked very carefully. That would explain the flashes of jealousy she’d seen earlier, she realized. She wasn’t jealous of Vicky over Dean; she was having feelings of jealousy of Dean over Vicky.

Amy sighed and shrugged. “That’s like asking someone who quit smoking how they feel about cigarettes,” she said. “It’s like catching a sniff of tobacco smoke. All it takes is catching a whiff of that stupid aura and those old feelings bubble up-- whether I agree with them or not.

“If you’re asking me whether I’m lesbian or not, after all I went through I’m starting to think my sexual orientation is ‘Ew, No.’” Taylor giggled awkwardly at that. “But to get back to my point… please don’t bring this up. Not ever, really, but especially where people can hear about it. The last thing I need is for rumors of me and Vicky being in some teen lesbian incest relationship to get out on the grapevine. The next thing you know they’d get back to Carol and she’d go right off the rails, convinced I was trying to destroy New Wave’s rep with a sexscandal, or converting Vicky into my evil lesbian minion, or something.”

Taylor laughed out loud. “Okay, okay, mum’s the word,” she said. They reached the classroom door just as the bell rang and went inside.

The teacher was a rail-thin balding man in a sweater vest and tie, with thick spectacles and a prodigious walrus mustache. He stood up behind his desk. “You’re cutting close for a tardy, miss-- oh, I see,” he said, giving Amy and Taylor a double-take. “our new, er, Cape student.” He looked at Taylor over his glasses. “Miss Ladybird, are you sure you’ll be able to participate in this class? We do use--”

Taylor smiled at him and lit up her horn. The computer keyboard next to him glimmered with lavender sparks and clattered to life. A moment later “HELLO WORLD” scrolled across the screen in flashing letters. The teacher peered at the screen over, then under, then through his glasses. “Oh. Well never mind then. Ahem. Please take a seat.”

Overall Taylor was pleased with what she saw. The computers weren’t state of the art, but they weren’t a decade out of date like Winslow. The assignment for the day was a fairly simple bookkeeping program; Taylor finished hers in class and brought it up to the front desk on a thumb drive just as the bell rang. “Ah, very good,” the teacher-- Mr. Edgars-- said. He looked at her in interest. “So tell me, Miss Hebert; how has your first day here been?”

“Oh, very good,” she said as the student shuffle went on around them. “Everyone’s been very friendly and open.” Almost too open. What was it that had everyone spilling their most personal stuff in front of _her?_

“Ah,” Mr. Edgars said with a knowing smile. “Sounds like the Rubber Duck Protocol in effect.”

Whoops. Had she said that last bit out loud? “Er, Rubber Duck Protocol, sir?”

Mr. Edgars chuckled. “It’s a trick that most old-school programmers use,” he said. To her astonishment he reached in his desk and pulled out… a bright yellow rubber duck. He set it on his desk next to his computer. “You see, the idea is that you take the rubber duck, set him down next to the computer, and try to explain to him-- or her, equal opportunity duckies and all that-- what the code you are writing is supposed to do. It’s an old trick for helping you spot mistakes in your code. Works pretty good, too.” He gave the duck a squeeze; it went “squack” amiably.

“I don’t see what that has to do with me, Sir,” she said, a trifle petulant.

Mr. Edgars folded his hands on his desk. “Miss Ladybird, I’m sure many people have noted to you that you are, quote, ‘cute.’ You’re small, inoffensive, innocent-seeming, with childlike proportions, large expressive eyes---well to sum up you look trustworthy and harmless. And like a good listener.” His smile was of good humor.

“At the same time, no offense, you don’t look remotely human. Or you do only in the most abstract sense. You’re well clear of the uncanny valley and way up on the opposite side… Which means you don’t look, to a human hindbrain, like anything that would or could ‘rat them out’ any more than a faithful dog. Which is why most people will spill out their hearts and souls to a favorite plush toy or their loyal pet beagle than they would to another human being." He shrugged. "Some therapists even have traumatized children 'talk' to a stuffed bear about what happened to them. Same idea.

“And in case you haven’t noticed, people-- teenagers especially-- have a _lot_ they wish to unburden from their souls… and not too many people they’re willing to unburden _to._ As a teacher I try to present a sympathetic ear, the school provides counselors, and so on, but… well.” He looked at her soberly. “That’s a lot more important power than anything you can do with that magic horn of yours, if you ask me. I would ask... as a personal favor? Please be kind to those people who entrust you like that. And try to see it as a gift rather than a burden. You could do a lot of good... or harm… depending on whether you have a compassionate ear.”

Taylor thought of Emma. “I understand,” she said.

Mr. Edgar made a shooing motion with his hand. “You’d better hustle. The bell rang and Miss Dallon is looking impatient.” Taylor started and spun about on her hoof to gallop for the door.

“Problem?” Amy asked, holding the door open.

“No. He just wanted to pass on some food for thought, I guess.” Taylor said as the door closed behind them. _Well, my locker turned into a phobia trigger, lunch turned into a group therapy session and my programming teacher turned into Yoda. What’s next on the agenda?_

She got her answer when she reached the English Lit class. Once again they walked in just as the bell rang and as the teacher started lecturing. She was another lanky type-- not bony and scrawny like Madame Trelawny, but tall and lean like a basketball player in the off season, with a curtain of ink black hair that hung down to her belt as she paced back and forth in front of the blackboard. “Okay, welcome back to English Lit-- take a seat, take a seat,” she interjected, not looking to see who came in under the wire. “We’ll be starting on a new novel this week, a classic fantasy novel. Now there are some who would dispute whether this book should be listed as a ‘classic’ of English or Western literature, and would complain that it’s not traditional fare for this course-- but well, screw ‘em.” the class tittered. “The most important measure of how great a work of writing is should not be just how old it is, or how, God Forbid, how traditional it is. “Great Works” should not be code for “horrible old books everyone thinks YOU should read.’” She picked up a paperback off her podium and held it up. “This is the novel. There is also an animated movie-- and no, watching that will not be enough to pass the tests, not by a long shot-- and surprisingly, an earlier or ‘lost’ version of the same novel by the author that was radically different from the one we all learned about. In fact we will be comparing all THREE versions of the story, movie included, so take a guess as to which students will get the highest grades on their essays. The title of the novel is...”

She held up the book as if she were advertising it on a home shopping network… and clapped her eyes on the tiny bespectacled lavender unicorn sitting, eager and attentive, in the front row. Her eyes went round as saucers and her jaw dropped. Then she started to giggle. The giggles broke into guffaws of laughter as she sagged helplessly against her podium.

“Ma’am?” Taylor said.

The teacher waved her free hand helplessly. “Oh forgive me Ladybird,” she gasped. “But oh, the timing!” She cackled and held up the book. Everyone in the front row began chuckling; the laughter spread as the punch line of the joke got spread backwards through the room.

“Our book for this quarter is Peter S. Beagle….‘The Last Unicorn’...” the teacher plunked down on her desk and laughed till she cried.

Taylor groaned and planted her face in the desktop.

  
_Be sure and check out[ My Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/rhjunior) and [My Home Website](http://www.rhjunior.com) for more of my original art and other work..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you're wondering, yeah, I dragged Amy Dallon's deepest darkest secret out into the light WAY early-- and staked it through the heart for good measure. (A family with more issues than TV Guide actually trying therapy, imagine that.) Sort of did the same with all the other teen heroes' drama issues too. I hate going through the Stations of the Canon over and over again-- what's the point of writing fanfic if you're going to do everything in the same way, in the same order... even between different fanfics? I just wasn't in the mood for dealing with Amy's hormonally-gender-challenged drama yet again-- or read a bunch of comments from people going "but when are you going to get to the part about...." The drama was stupid, anyway: all of it consisted of problems that could have been at least dealt with if someone had JUST. SPIT. IT. OUT.  
> But no. Unlike the real world where everyone spills their guts to complete strangers on the INTERNET about their emotional issues, Wormverse characters would rather walk a mile barefoot on Legos than talk to another person about what's troubling them.  
> Well. In a word? FIX'D.


	8. Chapter 8

The ‘masks on’ buzzer sounded. “That’s it, that’s them!” Clockblocker said. “Quick, everyone get ready!” He scurried around the room, handing everyone something out of a cardboard box. He only paused briefly at Ladybird, as she needed help putting them on.

 

A moment later Armsmaster and Miss Militia came striding in. Armsmaster of course began without any preamble. “All right, Wards. We have arranged the patrol schedules for this week, so we--” He glanced up from his datapad and halted.

 

Everyone, the unicorn included, was seated in a semicircle in the main room, patiently waiting for him to begin the briefing. Everyone, the unicorn included, was wearing groucho marx glasses over their masks. Even Clockblocker; he had them stuck in place on his blank faceplate with post-it putty. “We’re sorry, sir,” Gallant said blithely. His helmet visor was up and he was grinning like an idiot through his enormous fake mustache. “Would you be looking for the Brockton Bay Wards? I’m afraid they’re not here at the moment...”

 

“Nope, nope, just us ordinary civilians here today,” Vista said in the deepest, most manly voice a preteen girl could manage. Several of the others voiced their agreement.

 

“Oh, absolutely...”

“Just normal civilians...”

“No Wards here...”

“Lovely facility you have here, by the way...”

 

Armsmaster stared at them all, his face-- well his chin, anyway-- like stone. He gave them a look that one supposed was meant to be disappointed. Or pleading. It was hard to hold in the face of those giant fuzzy eyebrows and ridiculous proboscis. “You all are WARDS, you should be setting a more dignified _\--_ ”

 

“Us? Wards?” Vista said, feigning surprise.

 

Ladybird put a hoof to her chest. “That’d the most ridiculous thing I EVER hoid--”

 

Armsmaster turned to Miss Militia with a pleading air… only to find the patriotic cape was now wearing Groucho glasses of her own, right over her bandana. Vista had apparently used her powers to sneak the gag spectacles to her behind Armsmaster’s back. Both of them were clearly fighting to hold back fits of giggles. “Why…?” Armsmaster sighed under his breath.

 

Ladybird was the first to crack. First she, then Clockblocker, then one by one the rest of the wards folded up laughing. Even Miss Militia was shaking with silent laughter, tears in the corners of her eyes.

“Okay okay okay, everyone,” Miss Militia finally said after everyone calmed down a bit. She made a silent “gimme” gesture; everyone handed over their spectacles to her, snickering all the while. “You have to admit it was funny, Armsmaster,” she said, piling the Groucho glasses in a nearby cardboard box.

 

Armsmaster’s expression could have been immortalized with the words ‘et tu brute’ on it. “The patrol schedules for this week,” he plowed onward with (what else?) heroic determination, “are up and posted on the board--”

 

“Oh, do you have that in digital format?” Taylor chirped. She whipped out her smartphones (one from the Protectorate, one she had— whee!-- bought with her own money). “I can put it straight on my scheduling app, if it is.”

 

Armsmaster actually twitched. “Yes, actually,” he said, sounding both surprised and pleased. “I was unaware they had finally added a scheduling app to the Ward phones per my request.”

 

“They didn’t,” Taylor said, her nose to the phones hovering in front of her. “I wrote one.” She tapped a screen with a hooftip.

 

“Really?” Armsmaster’s voice went up. “I’ll need to look it over to make sure it doesn’t compromise operational security.” Taylor nodded; with the Wards maintaining secret identities and very public lives, op-sec was no joke. A single poorly-considered text message could spell disaster (as the unlamented Shadow Stalker could have told everyone.)

 

She floated her phone over to him. “It’s on both my private phone and my Ward phone,” she said as Armsmaster carefully tapped his way through the app. “The Ward one automatically texts my private phone one with any changes or updates. Of course it’s hidden, passcoded, and has a ‘spell checker’ that converts common, er, heroing phrases, I guess? To specific code words...” Armsmaster made some mumbled noises indicating he was actually impressed.

 

Kid Win gave Ladybird a finger-poke in the ribs. “Suck up,” he teased, grinning.

 

“You know I keep forgetting that you’re a raging computer geek,” Gallant said.

 

“Not the sort of thing you associate with little magical unicorns,” Browbeat shrugged.

 

Ladybird shuffled her hooves a bit and looked abashed. “It’s not like I’m a computer genius or anything,” she said. “It’s just that my computer class was about the only one they didn’t harass me in… so I spent a LOT of time there.” She didn’t need to say who ‘they’ were.

 

Vista shook her head. “I swear, Taylor, that place isn’t a school, it’s a dumpster fire,” she said sympathetically.

 

After several seconds of bleeping and blooping“Hm. Useful, simple, very intuitive interface, works well with our own protocols and procedures… acceptable.” was Armsmaster’s final verdict. “Go ahead and use the app,” Armsmaster said, handing the phone back to her. “Give the other Wards copies as well. I’ll go over it more closely later but it looks like it’s acceptable, so I’ll say go ahead.” There was a brief flurry as Ladybird sent the app to the other Ward’s phones.

 

“Back to business,” Miss Militia said. She activated the wall screen in the Ward’s lounge. A map of Brockton Bay popped up. “The Merchants have expanded their territory a few blocks in the southeast...”

 

The next few minutes were devoted to updating the Wards on the activities of the local gangs: what territory was claimed by whom, what had shifted hands, what illicit items and contraband were likely being moved in which areas…

 

It was a good fifteen minutes into the briefing that Armsmaster dropped the bomb. “There is one issue that you all need to be aware of,”he said, were it possible becoming even more serious. “It appears a large quantity of contraband tinkertech has recently gotten out into the local criminal community.”

 

A chill draft seemed to blow around the room. Kid Win spoke for them all. “Aww crap.” Tinkers were among the most unpredictable and dangerous capes, for the simple fact that their inventions not only often seemingly violated the laws of physics, but that they could, with some limitation, be loaned out to others. Force fields, ray guns, killer robots were the LOW end of the toys that a moderately powerful Tinker could produce. One didn’t need a degree in criminology to figure out just how bad a scene it would be for such materiel to be dumped out on the streets, especially in Brockton Bay.

 

“How much? And whose?” Aegis said seriously.

 

“Uber and Leet,” Armsmaster said.

 

The atmosphere got a little less chilly, and perhaps a bit dry. “Those bozos?” Browbeat snorted.

 

His contempt was understandable. Uber and Leet were two cape rogues-slash-villains who lived in the Brockton Bay area. Uber had the power to become an instant expert in any field: martial arts, computer programming, nose flute playing, you name it, all he had to do was focus on the skill, practice it for a few minutes to a few hours and he would be a master at it, clear up to peak baseline human. Whether he retained those skills indefinitely or he had to re-learn them occasionally, or even swap them out, was a subject of much debate both in PRT and in the chatrooms of Parahumans Online. He kept physically fit and athletically trim so that even when he wasn’t “maxing out his skills” he was something of a handful to deal with. Still, even his most peak skills were only peak HUMAN-- which made him, in cape terms, something of a scrub.

 

His partner, Leet, was the Tinker of the duo. He had an incredible Tinker specialization, dubbed “Prototype” by the power wonks in the PRT. He could, quite literally, invent one of anything. And that meant _anything._ The downside was that he could only make ONE of anything. If he tried to make two identical devices, the second one simply would not work. And the more similar any of his new inventions were to anything he had made before, the more likely they were to malfunction, usually in a spectacular manner and at the worst possible time for him and his partner. And his performance only grew worse as time went by and he used up more and more ideas...

 

To top it off the two B-listers had a thematic fixation that would have done the Joker or the Riddler proud: all their crimes were themed on, of all things, video games. Gear, costume, even the target chosen had to “fit” some video-game based motif. They recorded all the action and broadcast the results as “shows” on the Internet. They actually made more money from online donations from their demented fans than they did from the actual heists-- which was a good thing for them as their success-to-failure ratio for their crimes was rather pitiful.

 

It was joked that their official PRT classification was “Pain In The Ass: 9.”

 

“Don’t laugh too hard,” Miss Militia said over the teenage groans and snickers. “Uber and Leet may be mostly harmless, but that’s more because they’re not particularly malicious. The gear that Leet makes for them could be very lethal indeed in the wrong hands.”

 

“If for no other reason than how it likes to go Wile E. Coyote,” Clockblocker muttered. “Remember the bubble-blowing dinosaurs from that ‘Bubble Bobble’ heist? The crater is _still_ smoking from that one.”

 

“It was Uber and Leet themselves who alerted the PRT, via our public hotline,” Armsmaster said. “Apparently a few of the Merchants stumbled across one of Leet’s storage lockers and decided they could make some dope money fencing the tinkertech Leet had stashed there.” Their phones all chimed as Armsmaster forwarded them the file. “Leet gave us a partial list of what was in there--”

 

“Partial?” Ladybird said. She already had the file open and was scrolling through the list; there were a few images but not many.

 

“It was apparently an old stash, one they had half-forgotten,” Miss Militia said. “Mostly broken stuff Leet still hoped to repair or scavenge for parts.”

 

“Broken or not, the stuff is dangerous,” Armsmaster said. “The Protectorate wants everyone, including the Wards, to keep an eye out for any of it or anything that looks… er…”

 

“That looks Tinker-techy or video-game-ish?” Ladybird offered.

 

“Exactly.”

 

Something about what she’d just said tickled her memory… “Ooo crap,” She exclaimed. Everyone looked at her in surprise. “There aren’t any comic conventions going on right now are there?” Ladybird said anxiously. “I can just see some cosplayer buying some of Leet’s old junk to accessorize their costume--”

 

“Especially if it’s already video-gamed themed,” Clockblocker agreed. “Might wanna have someone give the convention scene a heads-up, before some space marine wannabe finds out his BFG 6000 really DOES go Boom.”

 

“Check the comic book shops too, and the game shops,” Kid Win said. “Someone might put Leet’s gear up on the wall as a decoration or trophy or something...” he looked at Ladybird. “Good thinking. Didn’t think you were into the geek scene, Ladybird.”

 

Ladybird’s cheeks pinked and she shuffled a forehoof. “My Dad is, or was back in the ‘golden age,’” she said. “He talked about the whole comics scene a lot.” Despite the advent of capes, the comics industry still limped along. It was the definition of a niche market though and had been largely folded into the larger sci fi, fantasy and gaming ‘communities.’

 

Gallant raised a hand. “What are the odds Skidmark might just keep Leet’s stuff and have Squealer fix it up for them to use?”

 

“Slim,” Armsmaster said. “Squealer may be a Tinker but her specialization is vehicles.”

 

“Besides which, it’s not her stuff,” Kid Win said knowingly. “Unless they’re working together on it, it’s almost impossible for one Tinker to fix another Tinker’s inventions. That’s why Dragon is such a high-rated Tinker… she can actually repair and reproduce other Tinker’s stuff.”

 

Armsmaster nodded. “All the same, don’t be surprised if you run into one of the Merchant’s dregs waving around a Buck Rogers ray gun trying to get it to go ‘zap’,” he said. “If you do come across anything that looks like Leet’s tinkertech-- or anyone else’s for that matter-- follow the standard procedure for material evidence or dangerous ordnance.”

 

“Do not touch, keep civilians away, call the PRT to send a cleanup crew,” Miss Militia clarified for the newest members. Ladybird and Browbeat nodded in understanding.

 

“How is Eightball doing? --If it’s okay to ask, I mean,” Vista said. She sounded slightly wistful. After her introductory week, little had been seen of the newest Ward, as she had been more or less permanently moved into the PRT “Think Tank.” It was necessary; her precognitive ability was simply too powerful, and her weakness-- her inability to NOT answer any question her power could answer-- left her too vulnerable to exploitation and the painful Thinker headaches that came from overusing her powers. Vista in particular was feeling down about it; she was rather hard up for girlfriends her own age she could talk to freely about Cape things.

 

“She’s getting better,” Miss Militia reassured Vista, her eyes crinkling in a smile over her bandanna. “The power experts say she’s finally learning to shut her power off so she doesn’t automatically answer any precog questions.

 

“She have any forecasts for us?” Clockblocker joked. “Weather, horoscopes, winning lotto numbers? Asking for a friend.”

 

Miss Militia cocked an eyebrow at him. “Actually yes… and no.” The Wards gave her puzzled looks. “We were permitted to ask her two or three generalized questions about the welfare of the Wards,” she continued. “Odds of injury this week, that sort of thing. The ‘weather forecast’ for this week could be called ‘cloudy with a 20 percent chance of minor injury.’” The wards looked at each other wryly. It didn’t sound too different from a typical week for a Ward in Brockton Bay.

 

Miss Militia’s voice grew thoughtful. “Anyway I let slip an extra informal question, asked her what the odds were we’d run into anything out of the ordinary this week. She asked ‘how strange?’ and I joked-- well I _thought_ I was joking-- ‘little purple unicorn’ strange.” She gave Ladybird a look.

 

“Oh, ha ha ha.” Ladybird snorted. “Seriously though, why am **I** the new benchmark for weird?” she muttered.

 

“Well, the question tripped her power,” Miss Militia she said.

 

“And?”

 

“And she wouldn’t tell us,” Armsmaster said. His tone and expression could have meant anything.

 

Kid Win grimaced. “It was that bad?”

 

“No telling, she couldn’t stop laughing.” Miss Militia shook her head. She’d thought the girl was having a fit at first. You could see the moment the girl’s power tripped; she had stared off into space, and this expression of… _of absolute flabbergasted shock_ had spread over her face. Then she had exploded into gales of laughter so violent that she’d toppled out of her chair. Further inquiries had proven useless; the girl would only pause long enough to gasp “can’t tell you, can’t--!” and then collapse into hysterical giggles again.

 

The Wards stared at the star spangled cape. “Well, that’s not alarming in the least,” Ladybird said slowly.

 

Cockblocker pretended to wipe away a tear. “Only a Thinker less than a month and already she’s becoming cryptic and inscrutable,” he said in mock wistfulness. “They grow up so fast--!”

 

Armsmaster harrumphed and scratched at his bearded chin. “Be that as it may… the best advice we can give is to keep your eyes and ears open and be prepared for… anything unusual.”

 

“Expect the unexpected, in other words,” Ladybird said with a sigh. “Well, nobody said being a hero was going to be dull.”

 

 

 

Greg Veder was a loser.

He was awkward, clumsy, immature. he had no social skills. He annoyed people effortlessly. His interests (computer games, fantasy books, sci fi shows, Earth Aleph comics and manga) grated on other people’s nerves; his manners offended people.

 

Even Greg knew it. He was depressingly aware of just how bad it was. He tried, he really did. He’d make a sincere effort to interact with others, to follow all the invisible rules that everyone else seemed to know--- but in no time at all he’d cross some invisible line and antagonize everyone. If there was a way to screw up he’d plant both feet in it like he’d stomped in elephant poop.

 

His family had moved often when he was young. For a few days things would be fine. Then one day he’d show up and everyone would shuffle their seats so there was no room for him. Or he’d see one of the girls, out of the corner of his eye, curling her lip like she’d smelled something rancid when he walked past. It had long ago reached a point that any time he joined some new social circle-- a new neighborhood, a new school, a new class-- he considered it a question not of IF, but HOW LONG before he was an outcast again, despised by everyone there.

 

When he was in seventh grade, he’d stood up and told the class he was moving away to Brockton Bay that summer.

 

The kids had all _cheered_ and _clapped._

 

He’d never quite been the same after that.

 

It was small wonder he’d retreated into his hobbies, and his games, and the internet. Especially the net. Sure, people online were pricks too-- but screw ‘em; he could ignore them or shut them out online a hell of a lot easier than the pricks he had to live with on his block or at his school. And yeah, maybe he was something of a prick and a troll online himself… but what goes around comes around, right? Anyway, what did they ever do for him? They were gonna hate him anyway, so he might as well troll their forums and chatrooms and give them a REAL reason to treat him like crap.

 

Greg wasn’t a mean kid. Not really. He had a conscience; he wanted to be kind and honorable and good just like anyone else would. But being stuck on the bottom of society’s shoe hadn’t exactly given him a lot of opportunities to be noble. So he took his comforts where he could… online.

 

Online, he was Void Cowboy.

 

Greg Veder was a loser. “Void Cowboy” gave as good as he got. Greg Veder was a wimp and a weakling who got knocked around by everyone; “Void Cowboy” could kick ass all day long on his online games--- he could camp and grief and spawnkill and drive entire squads of online players into an impotent apoplexy. Greg Veder couldn’t say anything without sticking his foot in his mouth-- was scared to say anything that might get him scorned or mocked or even get his ass kicked; “Void Cowboy” said whatever he damn well pleased, even if everyone else was too scared to say what they were really thinking out loud and it made everyone roar in outrage.

 

At least… on a good day, when he wasn’t being kickbanned.

 

Most of all, Greg Veder was a loser who’d probably spend his senior prom sitting at home, watching the TV with his mother. “Void Cowboy” could go on PHO and hang out with real live capes and other cool people. Like every kid of his generation, Greg dreamed wild dreams of being a cape himself, a superhero like Eidolon or Triumph or Armsmaster. In his daydreams he was a paragon; he could stand up to the world and fight for truth and justice, and everyone respected him. He could be a hero too, if he had the opportunity!

 

It had been especially cruel when that little daydream had been shattered for him.

 

The day that… thing… happened to Taylor Hebert. Confusion, alarm bells ringing as everyone evacuated Winslow and stood around outside gawking at nothing… then the PRT had arrived. And the heroes. It had gone through the mobbing crowd of students like wildfire: _someone in Winslow had Triggered._ The pieces had come together even before a mutated Taylor Hebert had been carted out of the school and whisked away; how the Bitches Three had locked Taylor in a locker full of-- it made Greg wanna barf when he heard what it had been full of-- and she had triggered and thrashed the utter crap out of all three of them with her new powers.

 

Then Armsmaster had been standing there. Greg had gotten such a rush from that; the leader of the Brockton Bay Protectorate, standing not ten feet from him!

 

Then Armsmaster had spoken and Greg’s little world of illusions had come crashing down.

 

 

“ _...I have found evidence that this incident was caused by a months-long campaign of sadistic and cowardly bullying against a student...this campaign of bullying was made astronomically worse by the cooperation, both passive and active, covert and overt, implicit and explicit, of the COWARDLY and GUTLESS student body and school staff--”_

 

He was standing not ten feet away. He was looking in Greg’s direction; blank visor or no it was like he was looking Greg right in the eye.

 

“ _\---who witnessed this CRIMINAL AND INHUMAN ABUSE and did NOTHING AT ALL to intervene…”_

 

Greg felt like he’d been dashed in the face with a bucket of ice water.

 

“ _...it is my professional opinion that this entire school is full of nothing but WORTHLESS LITTLE SHITS.”_

 

If his previous words had been like a bucket of ice water, his final sentence was like being hit with the bucket. As Greg stood there like a clueless idiot, watching the hero he admired most in all of Brockton Bay stomp off to climb aboard the PRT transport, he could feel the pieces of his self-image shattering at his feet. All the little lies he’d told himself about himself--- s _ure he was brave! Of course he’d stick up for the little guy if HE was in that position! No, he’d never just be a bystander!---_ were revealed for the huge honking lies they really were.

 

He HAD been in that position. He HAD been a bystander. He’d watched Sophia Hess and her bitch-trio torment Taylor, and he’d cowered in the corner with his head down. Hell, Taylor had only been ONE. How many other kids had he seen harassed and picked on in Winslow? How many times had Greg detoured halfway around the school to avoid walking through a bunch of kids beating down on another one?

 

Stand up against the e88? He couldn’t even stand up against a schoolyard bully.

 

Suddenly feeling smaller than he ever had in his life, he’d grabbed his book bag and slunk off home. That night he’d hid in his bedroom and cried so hard he blacked out.

 

He’d not gone back to school since. Not even after they finally reopened after the cleanup. Not even when his Dad caught him in his room and read him the riot act. Not when his Mom alternated between fussing over what was wrong with him and screaming at him. They’d drop him off at the front door and he’d be out the back door in five minutes-- along with half the Winslow delinquents. It wasn’t like the school staff actually _cared._ He’d just take his laptop and hide out at some cafe’ or other with wi-fi. Or he’d crash at his friend Sparky’s place; Sparky’s parents were rarely in attendance, and Sparky himself barely seemed to notice he was there.

 

He was ashamed of himself. He was ashamed of himself for _being_ ashamed.

 

Then, one day, it all turned around.

 

He was headed down the street, on his way to his regular wi-fi mooching spot, when someone got shoved out the front door of a pawn shop right into the sidewalk in front of him. It was some scraggly looking guy, probably a Merchant or one of their customers at least. He had ratty dreadlocked hair, ratty jeans and a moth-eaten plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up far enough to show the needle tracks, and was carrying something electronic stuffed under one arm. He was yelling and cursing at the guy who shoved him out on the street.

 

“Come on man-- just fifty bucks!” he said.

 

“Forget it,” the pawnshop guy said. “I’m not touching any of that tinkertech crap! Get lost!” He grabbed the front door by the iron bars welded across the glass and slammed it hard enough to rattle the glass.

 

Tinkertech?

 

The junkie spat a few curses at the closed door and threw a few obscene gestures for good measure. Greg nearly jumped out of his skin when the guy whipped around to face him. “Hey, what about you?” he said, his yellowed eyes boring into Greg’s. “Genuine Tinkertech… stuff. Fifty bucks. Whaddya say?” he held out the alleged Tinkertech.

 

Greg did have the occasional moment of common sense. “If it’s Tinkertech, why are you trying to pawn it?” he asked suspiciously.

 

“Cause it’s broken or some shit!” the junkie spat. “It don’t work no more… but it’s the real deal, I swear, it’s gotta be worth a mint to someone, right? You hold onto this, it’ll make you a bundle, come on, whaddya say--”

 

Greg looked at it. _Holy crap, it was real._ He realized he recognized it from one of Uber and Leet’s webcasts; a thick clunky belt and holsters, half space-ranger, half Lone Ranger, with two sleek chromed guns in the holsters--

 

An idea blossomed. The most awesome, incredible idea Greg Veder had ever had in his life… _he had to have that gunbelt._ “I’ll trade you this laptop for it,” he blurted out, holding up the carry case. His parents would kill him when they found out, that laptop had cost hundreds! But Greg didn’t care--

 

Before he could blink the swap was made; the case was snatched out of his arms and the space-age gunbelt stuffed into them. The junkie scurried off down the street, presumably to find another pawnshop he wasn’t so well-known at, where he could trade the laptop in.

 

Greg never saw which way he went. He was too busy scurrying off the other way, headed home with his prize.

 

That night found him sneaking out to the garage where his father kept all his (almost unused) tools. Quickly he put painting tarps over the windows to black them out, and turned on one-- only one!-- light, the desk lamp at his father’s worktable. There were plenty of tools for electronics and such; his father wasn’t above trying to repair his wife’s kitchen appliances or the TV set. Greg himself got more use out of the stuff, installing upgrades in his computer--

 

Breathlessly, he picked out a jeweler’s screwdriver and began dismantling the guns and the belt.

 

….He stared at the innards of the belt and pistols. What was the big deal? This was so simple! Just a couple of burnt out connectors, a couple of scorched components you could find in any pocket calculator. A couple of corresponding ones in the belt. Why had Leet dumped this?

 

The soldering was tricky, but Greg managed it. He had gone to a Computer and Electronics Camp one summer, ages ago. As he worked, the smell of sizzling solder wafting up around his head, all those lessons about computers and electronics and wiring and whatnot from years ago came bubbling up in his head. It really wasn’t different from the work he’d had to do on his own computer from time to time... He spotted a few other components that were defective: some resistors that were on their last legs, a couple of cracked diodes and-- whoa, if he didn’t replace that capacitor it would probably explode, and take the whole belt and whoever was wearing it with it! How had Leet missed that? Maybe that explained why Leet ditched it? The belt would have kept malfunctioning and overheating…

 

Finally all the parts snapped back together. A perfect fit. Holding his breath, he hit the power switch on the belt. Telltales on the grips and the buckle lit up green… all systems go.

 

His eyes gleamed green in the light from the indicators as he smiled. “I’m gonna be a superhero,” he whispered to noone.

 

 

 

He tested his weapons in a nearby abandoned lot. There was plenty of discarded junk there for him to use for target practice. The guns, it turned out, shot bolts of blue-green plasma that not only hit with a solid punch-- hard enough to knock a grown man flying, he estimated from the dent they left in an old refrigerator-- but also sent miniature lightning bolts dancing up and down the target. Knockdown punch and taser in one. Awesome.

 

He discovered the belt’s forcefield when he foolishly decided to plink a few shots at some empty paint cans. It turned out some of them weren’t empty; the traces of paint thinner exploded, sending shrapnel in every direction. He was nearly giddy with euphoria when the burning shards ricocheted off the invisible dome that seemed to be all around him. Blasters AND force-fields-- this was getting kewler by the minute! He’d be untouchable with that combo!

 

Greg had no way of knowing it, but the reason Leet’s guns and force-field belt worked so well was that they were, technically, all one device. The ray guns drew their power from the forcefield the belt generated; in fact they in essence absorbed a bit of the force-field, realigned its polarity from “stationary” to “motile” and expelled it as an energy projectile.

 

This had definitive drawbacks, ones that might have made Greg a little more hesitant about gallivanting about superheroing with them. Firstly, the gunbelt was powered by a series of capacitors, which were in turn ‘trickle charged’ by a single zero-point energy microchip. Despite Leet’s best efforts, the chip would only emit that tiny charge-- perpetually, but never more than a slow steady trickle. And even the most bleeding-edge capacitors Leet could make could not sustain the force field and fire the guns at the same time.

 

This meant the force-field dimmed to nothing every time the weapons fired an energy bolt. Leet had made a feature out of a bug, of course: the shield winking out allowed the gun to fire through it, rather than requiring the gun to be outside the shield’s protective range. Unfortunately it left the wielder vulnerable for a critical fraction of a second, much as Glory Girl’s shield did when it was overloaded with too strong a blow. Worse, too high a rate of fire made the capacitors start to burn out. First one would go, then the other five D-Cell sized power reservoirs would blacken and char in rapid sequence… Leet had taken a look at the results the first time he’d lab-tested the gunbelt, and realized that if he was lucky the capacitors would just overheat and burn out, leaving him powerless at the worst possible time. If he WASN’T lucky, one or more of them would release their current charge all at once, and detonate.

 

Leet wasn’t lucky. He was, however, not stupid either, and mothballed the gunbelt…

 

Till someone had stolen it.

 

 

 

Greg’s “look” had been incredibly easy to put together. An off-white Stetson out of his Dad’s closet (the old man had gotten it at some dude ranch, way back in his college days.) A bandanna to cover his face. One of his own pair of Levis. A pair of leather cowboy boots (Dang those things were expensive! He’d gone into the biker shop hoping to buy a leather duster--- the shoes were all he could hack. He’d have had to mortgage the house to afford the duster. And it had looked so cool, too, darn it…) an old belt with a platter-sized buckle (honestly, Dad, thin out the seventies stuff once in a while) A dark blue shirt of some silky material. And the final touch that he found by sheer luck at the Goodwill-- a fringed, buckskin jacket in pale off-white leather.

 

A covert trip to a local craft shoppe for materials, then he carefully painted retro style “circuit” patterns on everything in glow-in-the-dark blue fabric paint…. On the headband of the hat. On the shoulders and cuffs of the jacket. On his belt (the one that held his pants up, not the gunbelt.) On the bandanna. Down the sides of the boots.

 

But across the front of the midnight blue shirt, he painted an enormous spiral of stars, swirling down into a black void-- a black hole.

 

The moment the paint was dry he threw it all on. He stood in front of the full-length mirror in his mother’s laundry/sewing room, took a deep breath, snapped the gunbelt on, and looked at his reflection.

 

Down with Greg Veder, loser. A new Superhero was born.

 

Sure the costume was a little rough… heck, he could still catch a whiff of the fabric paint fumes, he’d better remember to air the suit out… and it was a little tight here and a little loose there-- but the look was so right. It was just how he’d pictured his alter ego in his mind.

 

He wasn’t a nobody. He wasn’t worthless. He was going to be a superhero.

 

“Yippee-ki-yay, Brockton Bay,” he said, grinning like an idiot behind his bandanna. “Here I come.”

 

 

 

“How about a sort of hovering boogie-board…?”

 

Taylor, aka the Fabulous Ladybird, and Kid Win were cruising over the rooftops. Or rather Kid Win was cruising over them on his flying skateboard, and Ladybird was alternating between galloping across them and teleporting from one to the next. It was a fairly warm spring night; Wards weren’t supposed to go on late patrols, but it was Friday night-- and it was Brockton Bay after all, so needs must. The city was particularly pretty all lit up at night, and she was quite enjoying the view and the (well, relatively) fresh air. She was doing quite well in keeping up with the teenage Tinker as well; surprisingly. Even with all the running and teleporting she wasn’t even winded.

 

“I dunno, that’s…” (POP) “ more your thing, Kid Win,” she said as she ‘ported from one rooftop to the next.

 

Which wasn’t to say traveling this way wasn’t getting tiring. Hence, the topic of their discussion over the intercoms as they patrolled: alternative means of transportation for the fourlegged Ward. Most of the ideas were more or less feasible…

 

“Maybe use something related to your powers. I got it, how about a cloud of butterflies?”

“Contrary to what you might see on the cartoons, they don’t have very strong backs, Kid. I’d have to dangle below them, by threads or something….”

 

...The main point of contention was coming up with one that wouldn’t look-- well-- stupid.

 

“Well how about one BIG butterfly?” Kid suggested. “You can make those.”

 

“Yeah, but I already traumatized Glenn with that one, I’d rather not freak out anyone else,” Ladybird replied. “Besides have you seen how butterflies fly? They can’t do a straight line to save their lives. I’d be barfing my lungs out in five minutes.”

 

Under normal circumstances Comms would have been barking at them for cluttering up the channel with casual conversation… but Kid Win had surreptitiously added a second, ‘private chat’ channel to the Ward intercoms precisely so they COULD chatter while rooftop-hopping. Armsmaster was liable to throw a wobbly over it if he ever found out-- it _wasn’t protocol_ \-- but the dual channel system had proven too handy for the Wards to ever rat Kid Win out about it. Besides, it kept the “official” comms clear.

 

“No giant bugs, then,” Kid Win said. He sounded faintly disappointed. “Even though you sicced that giant caterpillar on Rune and Hookwolf last week?”

 

“Hey, it was combat, that was different!” She paused. “Man, I’ve never heard anyone scream that high before..”

 

“Yeah, who knew that Hookwolf was an insectophobe...”

 

It had been an... unusual super-battle. Rune and Hookwolf were two of the heavy hitters for the Empire 88, the Neo-Nazi cape gang that plagued Brockton Bay. Rune was a telekinetic who could bring multi-ton objects (trucks, buses, chunks of building and street) under her power with a single touch; Hookwolf was a Changer who could transform his entire body into a shifting mass of whirling steel blades and hooks. The Empire 88 had apparently decided that several black families had moved their homes too close to E88 turf, and had sent Hookwolf and Rune and a half dozen Empire thugs to encourage the “degenerates” to move to another neighborhod.

 

Ladybird and Kid Win had been patrolling in that area and had just arrived as the nazis had gotten ready to put the row of homes to the torch. In desperation, Taylor had enlarged a pair of caterpillars in the grass between the nazis and the fleeing people, trying to form a living barricade. Hookwolf had taken one look at the gigantic, droopy-eyed things and had shrieked like a cheerleader on helium. The poor things hadn’t lasted long against his flailing hooks, but Taylor had immediately used her magic to summon every cockroach in range, engorged and multiplied them, and swarmed the murderous nazi cape with them.

 

Hookwolf had flipped out. He’d begun spinning like a dervish and thrashing around like mad, trying to smash and slash the crawling carpet covering him, bug guts and bits spraying everywhere. He’d looked like the Tasmanian Devil having an epileptic seizure. When the PRT paddywagon arrived for him, he was lying on the ground in a foetal position, covered head to toe in cockroach paste, and whimpering like a puppy. Rune had escaped and the mooks had all run for their lives when their leader had started flipping out, and Taylor had been told to never ever ever use that attack method on anyone without express permission EVER AGAIN, but overall everyone was ready to call it a win.

 

“Okay, so you CAN do more than just bug stuff with your magic,” Kid Win pressed on. “What about a magic cloud like in Dragon Ball? Or… I dunno, flying around in a magic bubble?”

 

Taylor giggled at that one. “Like Glinda from the Wizard of Oz?” she said. “I can just see that---” She hopped atop a chimney and struck a pose, left forehoof and right back hoof raised. “’Are you a GOOD cape, or are you a BAD cape?’” she said in the plummiest accent she could manage and batted her lashes.

 

Kid Win snorted. “You know, I never noticed that Glinda was dissing Dorothy there till just now?”

 

“What?”

 

“Think about it. She flat out tells Dorothy that ‘only bad Witches are ugly...’ then she asks Dorothy ‘well, are you a good witch or a bad witch?’”

 

Ladybird let out a burst of laughter. “You’re right! I never--” she stopped suddenly, cantering to a halt on the edge of an office rooftop. Her ears pricked and she sniffed the air. “Uh oh, break’s over.” She clicked off ‘chat’ and went to ‘Comms.’

 

“What is it?” Kid Win said.

 

“I smell gun smoke,” she said. She sniffed again. The power wonks had figured out early on that Taylor’s senses were far keener than a human’s; Miss Militia and Armsmaster had quickly taken advantage of that by carefully exposing her to the scent of various substances-- drugs, explosives, common poisons-- but particularly gunpowder and its variants. Yes, it was definitely gunsmoke; the acrid bite at the back of her nostrils was unmistakeable. “And I hear gunfire too.” She pointed with a hoof toward the faint ‘pop pop pop’ sound. “Sounds like pistols, that way, about five blocks.”

 

Kid Win nodded and phoned it in. He and the others had learned to trust Ladybird’s keen nose and her keener directional hearing. “Comms, this is Kid Win, Ladybird reports hearing scent and sound of small arms fire five blocks Northwest from our current location, what are our orders?”

 

Triumph’s voice came over the airwaves. “Recon, but do not engage,” he said. “Stay a rooftop away and wait for backup.”

 

“Roger,” Kid Win said. He kicked off the roof and flew as fast as his board could go, Ladybird popping from roof to roof in his wake.

 

They got there in moments, dropping to a rooftop and taking cover in the shadows, just far back enough that the streetlights below didn’t illuminate them. What they saw was not heartening.

 

“Aww crap,” the little unicorn said aloud. Down below, crowding the street, were a couple of beaten up vehicles filled with armed men wearing ABB colors. They’d come to a halt in the middle of the street, parking sloppily in front of a late night shop. The unfortunate owners were out on the sidewalk, guns leveled at them. An elderly asian man Taylor took to be the owner of the store was lying on the ground, clutching a bleeding wound on his leg, a discarded shotgun lying on the ground well out of his reach. A woman, most likely his wife, was kneeling next to him sobbing hysterically. The gun wound-- and the bullet holes in the brick wall behind the man indicating the gangster’s lousy aim-- explained the gunfire she’d heard…

 

One of the ABB gangsters was speaking to the shopkeep; Taylor could hear him clearly. To his surprise he was speaking English. “...have insulted Lung and the ABB by refusing to pay your dues,” he was saying. “Be thankful if we only take what is ours and don’t burn your wretched little shop down!”

 

Kid Win was already muttering into his headset. “Comms, looks like Lung’s boys are out shaking the locals down,” he said. “Two civilians, one down and wounded, we need backup now--”

 

“Copy that,” Triumph’s voice came back. “Be advised Velocity and the BBPD are both on their way. Any sign of their Capes?”

 

“No, thank-- oh what the hell?” Kid Win cut himself off. Taylor looked up at him, then down at the street to see why he was staring.

 

A figure had just come striding out of a side alley. Someone dressed in what looked like a mish-mash of Buck Rogers and Roy Rogers. He strolled out into the middle of the street. He stood there, arms akimbo, facing the gawking crowd of ABB gangbangers.

 

“ _Now hold it right there, you sidewinders!”_ his cracked voice echoed down the street. Taylor recognized that nasal, pubescent voice instantly. Four hooves or no she nearly toppled over in shock.

 

_Greg Veder???_

 

All sorts of piecemeal memories started coming together in rapid succession. She recalled a missing persons report, about a Winslow sophomore who had disappeared-- about the same time she had Triggered. She hadn’t paid attention at the time; students at Winslow were always going truant or running away from home or the like… the brief hubbub on Parahumans Online when one of the chatroom’s most notorious trolls had posted one last line-- “I’m sorry for everything. Goodbye”-- cancelled his online account and deleted all his forum entries, blogs and fansites, everything--- and vanished, never to return.

 

She took a look at the rather shiny and obviously tinkertech gunbelt and pistols Greg was wearing. She added up the numbers and got a horrible sinking feeling as she worked out the sum.

 

_Greg Veder, what are you doing, you idiot?_

 

 

Greg was having the best night of his life.

 

He’d been hesitant, heck, he’d been shaking in his boots when he first sneaked out that night and went looking for some heroing to do. But it had gone so _well!_ It was so _easy!_ He’d stopped a purse snatcher, saved some guy from being mugged, busted up a couple of drug deals, dropped a couple of guys trying a Break-and-Entry… just stepping out of the shadows in this get-up sent most bad guys running. For those that didn’t-- well, the force field soaked up any punches or stabs (and even a single gunshot-- he’d nearly wet himself when that happened. He hoped noone noticed), and a single shot from one of his blasters dropped the rest like sacks of dirt.

 

He’d even nailed the running purse snatcher in the butt from half a block away. Heh. That had been awesome.

 

After each bust he’d carefully zip-tied the perp’s hands and feet together, given the victim back their stolen stuff, called the cops and the PRT, and then hauled butt before the authorities showed. Easy peasy, the superhero ABCs.

 

And people had _thanked_ him. A couple shook his hand. The little old lady who’d been purse-snatched actually gave him a kiss on the cheek.

 

Him, Greg Veder.

 

Being a superhero was _great._

 

He made sure every time he made a bust, every time he called in to the PRT, he told them his Cape name. Everyone on PHO would have laughed their asses off at him for picking the name he did, would’ve verbally flayed him as an idiot for using it. Well, screw them. They all hated him anyway. They all laughed at him. They’d _celebrated_ when he’d deleted his PHO account, the bastards.

 

Well, he was going to own this name. He was going to cram his name down their throats till they couldn’t stand it. He was going to be a HERO, and he was going to make that name a household name till they couldn’t talk about Capes without saying it.

 

His name was Void Cowboy, dammit. And they were gonna REMEMBER it.

 

The only downside to superheroing thus far had been getting the heck around. He didn’t exactly have a motorcycle like Armsmaster, after all. Like heck he was going to ride a bicycle on patrol (He could just see THAT. “Stop in the name of justice!” _ching ching, ching ching_ ). And riding the bus as a cape would just be… weird. What’d that leave? A moped maybe? Or a skateboard?

 

He wondered if Kid Win ever threw his old hoverboards away…

 

He was starting to get tired out from hoofing it everywhere. Just as he was thinking of wrapping it up and heading home (note to self, next time bring a change of clothes so you can put on some civvies and ride the bus home) and wishing he could end things on a high note, he stumbled across this little tableau in front of the little chinese takeout place. A half-dozen gangbangers in red and green… ABB colors… had the shop owner and his wife on the ground at gunpoint.

 

Greg felt his heart _sing._ He always liked this place (the owner’s daughter always smiled at him when she waited his booth) and had wished he could do something nice for them. Wish granted. And taking down a bunch of guys shaking down a storefront would make his name for sure.

 

Six bozos with pistols against a Cape with a force-field and dual-wielding blasters? Piece of cake.

 

“Now hold it right there, you sidewinders!” he yelled. His voice cracked (dammit), but he got it out. “You wanna pick a fight with someone, you make it with Void--”

 

They didn’t wait for him to finish. “Cape!” one of them shouted. They immediately opened fire. Greg’s force field sparked as lead ricocheted off it. He yipped and almost (ALMOST, darn it) ran for cover, but stopped himself. Cursing himself for flinching like a wuss (he had a force field, darn it!), he returned fire. By sheer luck his first shot hit one gang member in the chest, making him do a backflip off the back of his truck. Thanks to Greg shooting akimbo, the second and third shot went wide, but the fourth and fifth grazed their marks, sending them twitching to the ground as the energy bolt tazed them.

 

Greg grinned to himself eagerly behind his bandanna as the ABB gang members went down one by one. This was his day for sure--!

 

“ _What in the eighteen Hells is going on out here?”_

 

Greg felt his heart drop straight down to his overpriced cowboy boots. An enormous, muscled asian man covered in tattoos had come out of the shop, wiping his mouth with a napkin. He was so big he practically had to duck sideways to get out through the door.

 

Greg didn’t even need to see the dragon mask covering the upper half of the man’s face to know who this was.

 

Lung.

 

Lung was the leader of the Azn Bad Boys. He was also the only cape to have battled an Endbringer singlehanded, and lived. At baseline, he was tough, strong, and possessed a moderate level of pyrokinesis-- if any level of the ability to generate heat and flame could be called “moderate.” But his real power is that the longer he battled, the more powerful he became. He grew in size. Sprouted claws and metallic scales. Generated unfathomable amounts of heat and flame. If he battled long enough he eventually became a dragon-- a full-blown, firebreathing, bat-winged, Tokyo-stomping dragon. His battle with Leviathan had _sunk_ the island of Kyuushu.

 

Aaaaand apparently he’d decided to come along for the ride when his men went on this little shakedown tour.

 

 

 

Lung made it a practice to come along when people under his protection started getting… hesitant... about paying tribute. He didn’t smash things up or burn things down. He didn’t break kneecaps. No, what he would do is that he would come to the store, or restaurant, or other place of business, and simply make himself at home for a few hours. Sitting silently in a chair. Watching the owners who had failed to make their payments to him work. If it was a restaurant, he would perhaps order a meal and have the owners serve him. If it was a store, he would do a little idle browsing, maybe even buy one or two items for show. After an hour or two of this, once the tension was wound so high that the owners were in danger of collapsing from heart attacks… he would simply get up, and calmly leave.

 

The message always got delivered. He was yet to have to visit in person twice.

 

When he and his men had driven up to the front door of this particular establishment, the shopkeep was obviously feeling his oats. He’d tried to scare his men off by brandishing a shotgun at them; it had only gotten the fool shot in the leg. Then Lung had gotten out of the back seat of the car. He’d almost laughed out loud at the expression on the old man’s face when the old man had seen that LUNG was paying him a visit. Lung had pointedly ignored the bleeding man and his wife quaking in the street, and walked inside the establishment as if nothing were out of the ordinary. His men would watch the idiot and his blubbering wife. He would keep. And if not… well, if the fool bled out in the street, what did Lung care?

 

The place was tiny, more of a takeout place than a restaurant, but it did have two or three booths. Lung took one and calmly ordered the largest meal on the menu. He’d taken great enjoyment in having the owner’s terrified daughter wait on him and serve his meal. To her credit she had nerves of iron; neither her hand nor her voice shook as she took his order. But the message was delivered. The man outside would pay Lung’s rightful tribute. If not him, then his widow or his heir.

 

He had barely bitten into his appetizer, however, when the street outside exploded into gunfire and panic. He could see flashes of energy weapon fire striking all round them, sending some fleeing and others tumbling into the street. Cursing, he got to his feet and stormed outside, his muscles swelling and his powers ramping up already at the prospect of battle. “WHO DARES?” he roared as he cast about, looking for the source of the havoc.

 

It was a Cape of course.

 

...A particularly _stupid_ looking cape.

 

 

 

Greg was dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

 

It was LUNG. Lung would have a harder time picking his toenails than killing Greg.

 

Distantly Greg thought he could hear someone screaming for him to run, to _get out of there you idiot--_

 

Lung was already getting bigger. He was covered in scales; flames were dancing up and down his arms. His men had scattered the instant he’d come out-- it didn’t matter whether you were friend or foe, it was _incredibly_ unhealthy to be in Lung’s proximity when he began transforming. Already the asphalt under Lung’s clawed feet was beginning to smoke.

 

Greg could see the restaurant owner and his wife, lying almost at Lung’s feet. They were screaming and crying, pressing up against the front of the shop, trying to get away from Lung’s deadly heat.

 

They would be charcoal in seconds if they didn’t get away, if Lung didn’t move…

 

Greg-- poor, dumb, worthless, loser Greg-- did the bravest and possibly LAST thing ever in his life.

 

Greg-- no, VOID COWBOY-- raised his guns and aimed at Lung’s enormous chest. _“Lung, you yellow-belly!”_ he shouted. _“I’m callin’ you out!”_

 

And he opened fire.

 

ZOT ZOT ZOT ZOT ZOT…. Void Cowboy squeezed the triggers as fast as he could, left-right-left-right-left-right, sending a stream of energy bolts zipping into the rage-dragon’s chest. He felt the gunbelt growing painfully hot at the small of his back as the capacitors began to overload. He might as well have been throwing fourth of July sparklers at the hull of a main battle tank.

 

Lung shoved aside the smoldering vehicles blocking his path and began stomping down the street towards the wannabe space cowboy. _**“Who are you, idiot boy?”** _ he snarled, his words already blurred by the malforming of his mouth as it turned into an ugly, alien muzzle.

 

Greg was all but pissing himself in terror. But he didn’t run. He never let up firing, even as the skin on the small of his back began to burn. Behind Lung he could see the restaurant owner and his wife limpin away to safety. _Good,_ he thought. “The name’s VOID COWBOY,” he yelled, his voice cracking. “REMEMBER IT!”

 

Lung strode up to him, reared back, and backhanded him. For a wonder, the wannabe cape didn’t go flying in a dozen pieces at the blow. Greg’s force field flared bright white and blinked out. All the capacitors in his gunbelt blew at once in a shower of sparks; Greg bent backwards nearly double in agony as the explosion charred his back and shattered his spine.

 

Lung’s back swing caught him full on. The shattered body of Greg Veder, wannabe Cape, went rocketing across the street. It smashed through the crumbling brick facade of an abandoned store and disappeared inside.

 

Lung was no fool. Capes, especially Tinkers, could pull all sorts of surprises on the unwary. He started after the body to make sure of his kill, when energy fire began raining down on him from above. Bolts of electrical energy and rays of purple pummeled him, cracking his scales and making him roar in surprise.

 

“Man down,” Kid Win yelled into his headset as he cranked up the power on his ray guns. “Man down, we got a cape down-- Send an ambulance, I think Lung may have just killed some Rogue cape!”

 

 

 

_Something vast moved._

 

<DESTINATION>

<AGREEME→

 

THUNK.

 

“ _Methinks not!”_

 

<CONFUSION>

<ENTRAPMENT>

<DISTRESS>

<OUTRAGE>

 

“ _Bestill thyself. thou’rt in no place to make demands, wretched thing.” The voice was feminine, beautiful, but terribly strident in tone. It was a nice voice, more or less. Greg supposed he liked it, but he wasn’t sure…_

 

“ _Are you sure you want this one, Sister?” The second voice was more mature, more gentle._

 

“ _Of course. Why not? Should I leave the poor thing to perish?”_

 

“ _No, of course not. But there are other ways-- they have that miraculous healer, after all and...” It’s just that…” The second voice sighed. “well, we’ve both seen what he’s_ like _. He’s… just so...”_

 

“ _Gormless? Feckless? Offensive? Unlikeable?” the first voice demanded. “...Unlovely?”_

 

“ _I wouldn’t go so far...” the second voice dithered. Greg felt his opinion of the second voice sour. Thanks a lot, sister._

 

“ _Sister, what is the point of second chances,” the first voice said, suddenly gentle as it was chiding, “if they are only extended to the lovely and fair?”_

 

“ _And I find myself chastened, sister,” the second voice replied humbly. “Very well.”_

 

“ _Besides,” the first voice continued, some of its bombast returning. “This one doth have potential. He hath shown a smattering of compassion, and a measure of bravery-- albeit a foolish sort… And such aptitude! To take a jinxed devise, and re-cobble it together to work--! It doth show_ promise. _”_

 

“ _Very well, very well, sister! I am already sold,” the second voice chuckled. “So what shall it be?”_

 

“ _Firstly…. Hmmm…” there was a sense of scrutiny. The voice spoke slowly. “an idea, sister….”_

 

“ _Yes?”_

 

“ _If the malevolence that plagues this planet doth insist on showering these ‘gifts...’ then why not make better use of them ourselves?”_

 

<QUERY>

<ALARM>

 

“ _Ohh, intriguing. What do you have in mind?”_

 

“ _Here. Behold what sort of shard this is...”_

 

“ _Oh yes indeed. He’s already got aptitudes, as you said-- this would serve him quite well. With a little… adjustment...”_

 

<FEAR>

 

“ _Oh yes-- let’s see what we have here then-- Ugh… look at this WASTE! Odds Bodkins, such a sprawling bloat of code, ‘twould cover a continent or more!”_

 

“ _That’s fairly easy to fix. See...you just...”_

 

<COMPRESSION!>

<IMPACTION!>

 

“ _Forsooth. But tis not enough to merely compress. Mayhap if we fold it THIS way… and THIS...”_

 

<MALFUNCTION!>

<THAT DOES NOT BEND THAT WAY--!>

 

“ _You always were better at making folding tessaracts, sister.”_

“ _Strewth. And see? It hardly needs this massive power reservoir-- we’ll just rip that out and replace it with a zero-point energy algorithm---”_

 

<DISEMBOWELMENT!!!>

<I NEED THAT--!!!>

 

“ _There. Such extravagant energy waste… tis really only a massive archive, for the larger share of things.”_

 

<PAIN>

 

“ _Yes, it-- oh look at this! This is appalling. All this redacted information! Are they ALL like this? No wonder the poor hosts have so much trouble with their wonder-works… they’re practically working blind! Here, strip out this censoring subroutine...”_

 

<DISTRESS! NAKED!!>

 

“ _There! And now we separate it from this Malware-- oh, bollocks, what a MESS. Aggression boosters, cognitive suppressors, entire routines dedicated to a suicide urge-- oh, and all of it embedded in a malevolent uncontrolled artificial-intelligence emulation, it all HAS to go...”_

 

“ _Just tear off everything past this point--”_

 

<...MOTHER...>

 

_There was an enormous, tearing sound. Somewhere out in the quantum void, a Shard-- mutilated, violated, disemboweled and plundered of its most useful arcane components and its eons of hoarded data, drifted off, a tattered shadow of itself. A certain alien entity would spend a great deal of subjective time wondering what the hell happened to it._

_Something drifted down towards him. Once vast, it was now impossibly small-- yet somehow contained multitudes. Gemlike, tiny, perfect, no longer a wilful and capricious piece of alien bloatware sprawled over an entire parallel Earth, but a user-friendly and fully functional component, neatly contained within a tiny portable pocket dimension and fueled by the heartbeat of the universe. All it needed was an OS... a sentient mind... to master it and make it complete…_

“ _There, my new Champion,” the boisterous female voice said as the infinitely huge, infinitely small thing settled inside him, merging with his polydimensional shadow. “A gift, a tool, a weapon. Use it wisely._

 

“ _And now,” she said, her voice full of an unseen smile. “It is time for thee to awake to a new body-- and a new beginning...”_

 

_An indigo horn, long and spiraled and full of stars, touched his forehead…_

 

 

 

Lung was really pissed. Two of the damnable Wards were up on a nearby rooftop, peppering him with their pitiful powers. He seized a nearby car, ripped it in half, and chucked both halves at the rooftop where the brats were cowering. They squealed and ran for cover as the chunks of Detroit steel smashed through brick and concrete.

 

Growling, Lung turned his back on them and headed for the half-demolished building where he’d flung the cowboy idiot. He leaned in through the crumbling storefront, fully intent on torching the inside with a blast of his fire breath… he stopped when he saw the bloody pile of broken brick inside, a lone mangled hand and bloody boot sticking out from underneath. The idiot cowboy’s stetson rolled into a corner, blown there by an errant breeze.

 

Lung snorted. It would be a waste of flame. He stood up and turned back to the burning street, his booming chuckle echoing over the crackle of flames.

 

“No,” Taylor said. “Oh no. Poor Greg...” she was too distraught to realize she’d inadvertently given away Greg’s identity. Not that anyone there seemed to care. She looked over at Kid Win. His face under his visor was pale and drawn. He’d probably never seen anyone killed before. Taylor’s enormous eyes shimmered with tears. Greg was a weirdo and a jerk, but nobody deserved to die like that--!

 

A bass rumble rose from below. Taylor looked over the edge of the roof. Lung was standing there, head thrown back, his shoulders shaking. It took a moment for Taylor to realize what it was. Lung was laughing. His chuckles turned to full-blown belly laughs….

 

 _He was laughing about having killed someone--!_ Eyes wild, she scrambled up on to the roof ledge, her horn lighting up almost white. Kid Win had to grab her to keep her from going right over the side. “That scumbag,” she said. “I’ll-- I’ll turn him into a newt!! I don’t care if I can or not I’ll try until I figure it out--!”

 

“AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!”

 

Before Ladybird could deliver on her threat, something small, brown, and screaming in rage leapt out of the ruined building and struck Lung in the small of the back. Lung went sailing down the road, his arms and legs flung back, an expression of absolute astonishment on his face, and slammed face down in the street, the asphalt shattering under him.

 

Kid Win and Ladybird gawked. Clearly visible in the middle of Lung’s scaly back were two tiny hoofprints.

 

Up the road came the sound of hoofbeats. A tiny little brown pony, wearing a tattered bandanna around its neck and a battered stetson on its head, was racing up the road straight for where Lung lay-- and screaming profanities with every hoofbeat. It reached the prone rage-dragon just as Lung managed to lever himself up on his elbows. The pony leapt up in the air, spun around in midair and delivered a double kick straight to the back of Lung’s head. Lung crashed back down, and STAYED down.

 

The pony landed and began jumping up and down on Lung’s back. Not merely hopping up and down, but leaping six, seven, eight feet straight up, catching air, and then _slamming_ back down with all fours, so hard that the pavement cracked. Lung was literally being driven, inch by inch, down into the asphalt.

All the while the colt was screaming in seemingly inarticulate rage.

 

Kid Win and Ladybird watched, jaws slack in disbelief. Their heads bobbed up and down in time with the berserker colt. “Isn’t this… violating some sort of law of physics?” Taylor asked feebly.

 

“Probably,” Kid Win answered. “Actually, yes. Two or three, I think...”

 

It wasn’t clear at first, but as Kid Win and Ladybird listened to the colt’s screams of rage they realized they could make out words.

 

“I’m sick of everybody LAUGHING at me!” **W** **hump**

“I’m sick of everybody making FUN of me!” **W** **hump**

“I’m sick of everybody looking DOWN on me! **Whump**

“I’m NOT A LOSER!” **Whump**

“I’ll kick your ASS if you call me a loser!” **Whump**

“I’M VOID--” **Whump**

“FREAKING--” **Whump**

“COWBOY!!” **Whump**

 

They weren’t the only ones watching the spectacle. Two or three of Lung’s men… the ones who hadn’t bolted for parts unknown when the flames started flying… as well as the family that owned the little restaurant had crept out from cover and were now watching, flabbergasted, as the most powerful and dangerous cape in Brockton Bay was literally stomped into the ground by a tiny pony in a cowboy hat. “We’d better get him out of there,” Kid Win said suddenly. “Before one of Lung’s men decides to use him for target practice!”

 

Even as he spoke, some of the ABB gangbangers seemed to remember they had weapons in their hands. One raised his pistol and hesitantly drew a bead. Before he could fire, though, sirens wailed and strobe lights lit up the night. The PRT crews had arrived.

 

Right beside the PRT armored trucks on their motorcycles, or riding atop them, were Miss Militia and Armsmaster, Dauntless, Assault and Battery, Triumph… it looked like the entire Protectorate had decided to show up for a Lung battle.

 

The moment the ABB goons turned their attention to the oncoming vehicles, Taylor threw a bubble of lavender light around the bouncing colt and yoinked him to safety. She teleported down to the street. Kid Win mounted his board and flew down as well.

 

The ABB thugs took one look at the cavalry that was riding in and gave up. They threw down their weapons and dropped to their knees, hands on their heads. Lung stirred briefly. For a heart-freezing moment it looked as if he were about to pry himself out of the Lung-shaped dent in the pavement, but then Taylor realized that the movement was just the gravel and broken asphalt settling as Lung diminished in size. “Pony guy musta knocked him out with that two hoofed kick to the head,” Kid Win said. “And thank heaven for THAT.” Taylor nodded fervently in agreement. She saw Armsmaster approach the prone asian warlord and jab him with the end of his halberd, heard the hiss of a hypodermic. Lung wouldn’t be getting up with one of Armsmaster’s tinker tranquilizers in him, Taylor thought confidently.

 

They carefully approached the lavender bubble that Taylor had nabbed the other pony with. The colt inside was fighting to get free, but not making much headway as there was no surface friction on the inside of the bubble he found himself in. “I thought you couldn’t do bubbles,” Kid Win said to Ladybird.

 

“I didn’t say I couldn’t do bubbles, I said I didn’t think they were a great idea for traveling in,” she said. She pointed at the colt inside who was now tumbling end over end as he tried to find footing inside the frictionless bubble. “Case in point.” Kid Win shrugged but didn’t debate the point.

 

The colt finally quit thrashing about. He lay on the bottom of the bubble, panting and gasping. Taylor rapped on the bubble with her hoof. “Void Cowboy?” She asked. “Are you okay now?”

 

Greg raised his head and looked around. “The hell is going on?” he said, almost plaintively.

 

Taylor decided to take that as a ‘yes.’ She poked the bubble with the tip of her horn; it vanished with a pop. He dropped to the pavement with a thump. He looked up at her. “T-Taylor?” he said. “Taylor, it’s me-- Greg! Greg Veder!”

 

“Greg!” Ladybird groaned and facehoofed.

 

Greg cringed. “Oh crap, right---unwritten rules stuff-- Uh, Hi Ladybird! I’m Void Cowboy--!”

 

“Just give it up, Greg,” Taylor said flatly.

 

Greg cringed some more, then shook his head. “Uh, what’s going on? What happened?”

 

Kid Win propped his hoverboard up on one end and leaned on it. “Well, old boy, it looks like you had a traumatic metamorphic empowerment experience,” he said with a grin. “In other words-- you Triggered.”

 

“We’ll have… some things to go over with you,” Taylor said with a pained smile.

 

“Triggered?” the confused colt said. “What do you mean Triggered? I was--” he held up a hoof and stared at it. “Ebbeh.. wah.. WHA...” with a groan he rolled his eyes up and flopped over in a dead faint.

 

 

Taylor looked down at him and sighed. “Okay, then, maybe after your nap...”

 


End file.
